These crazy loan amounts are not taken by most students. There are many ways that most people choose to keep their costs low - living not as nice housing, not going to your top school, working while in college.
Most of these people with huge debts are getting graduate degrees and they significantly skew the results when looking at the average, the median is far more insightful.
An appropriate correction, but I don't think it changes the inevitable feeling of doom that many college students and recent graduates face. $25,000 is an enormous amount of debt, especially when there is a multitude of uncertainties with the investment. When you borrow for a house or car, there is an immediate, tangible benefit. With college, it's not so simple. It would be great if you didn't need to go to college, but let's face it. You simply make more money with a degree, and many employers require them. There is an undeniable problem with tuition rates over time and its affect on the mental health of many American students.
>$25,000 is an enormous amount of debt, especially when there is a multitude of uncertainties with the investment.
If that $25k is public loans, which it should be since that's well under the limit, the uncertainty should be mitigated by income based repayment plans. You'll never have to pay more than 10% of your disposable income (income over 1.5x the federal poverty level).
If anything I think the feeling of doom is caused by people constantly telling kids how bad student debt is without realizing that $25k in public loans and $200k in private loans are vastly different situations. Most younger people I know feel guilty about taking out $25k in loans to make hundreds of thousands more over their life time.
> ...$25k in loans to make hundreds of thousands more over their life time.
1. Future reward should be discounted, usually by a fairly large constant, because of interest and risk. Also, in many fields, most of those extra hundreds will come toward the end of a career. So, highly discounted.
2. I wonder if it's really a good idea to set up a society where banks that provide educational loans are able to capture huge percentages of future productivity. Seems like this would have all sorts of really negative outcomes. Some of those negative outcomes are already happening -- e.g., we effectively import 90+% of our scientific human capital because US students aren't willing to do phds.
We realize that allowing financiers to capture a big chunk of the rewards for K-12 ed is a bad idea. Why don't we realize that the same is true for college?
1. Enough of the extra income is weighted towards the beginning that for most people it's worth $25k particularly since repayment us based on income.
2. Public loans are over 90% of disbursements, and if you're only borrowing $25k you're definitely getting public loans. Public loans are made directly from the treasury. No banks involved.
Also most stem phds work as researchers and teachers--they generally aren't paying tuition.
> Enough of the extra income is weighted towards the beginning... No banks involved....
Whether it's banks or other taxpayers or recipients of other entitlement programs is, I guess, a bit of a red herring wrt the point I was trying to make.
The question is about the knock-on effects of squeezing an entire generation for some chunk of what they're worth before they even enter the job market.
Again, I think the K-12 analogy is the best way of communicating the point I'm trying to make. Why don't we also charge high school students $10K @ 4% instead of paying for high school through taxes? Well, because that would be a huge net negative for society.
> Also most stem phds work as researchers and teachers--they generally aren't paying tuition.
I have a stem phd :). I was referring to the huge opportunity cost re: delayed earnings. US students opting out of phds because they have huge student debt to service is a real thing. This is true even when the phd would undoubtedly increase lifetime earnings (e.g., students from no-name schools turning down CMU/MIT/Berkeley/Standford phd acceptance letters for mid five figure salaries).
You don't need to pay public loans back while getting a phd, so it's not because they have to service them. An extra few years of interest isn't going to matter in the long run.
If it would undoubtedly increase life time earnings it's a stupid decision to turn it down because of undergrad student loans. That makes absolutely no sense.
>red herring
I was taking your post at face value. It lamented allowing financiers to capture value.
I'm also not against tax payer funded college. But the loan system we have in the US combined with income based repayment is not as bad as people think it is. Mostly people just don't understand income based repayment and public vs. private loans.
$25k is actually less than the average price of a new car sold in the US. It's not an enormous amount of debt. It's manageable.
Would it be better if students didn't owe money after college? Yes. Is the student loan debt equivalent of a new midrange Toyota Camry a life-crushing burden? No, not really.
It might or might not be a life-crushing burden for individuals. But it's still an incredibly risky burden for a fragile economy.
And personally I don't find "And don't even think about a graduate degree unless you want to end up with >$40k" all that reassuring for those with postgrad talent and ambitions.
I don't know who says "And don't even think about a graduate degree unless you want to end up with >$40k". When I went to grad school the standard advice was that you shouldn't go anywhere without a free ride in the form of tuition waivers and/or a stipend or TA job.
Professional schools (law, medicine, MBA, etc.) are different, but they also cost way more than $40k.
I don't know many people who get saddled with $25k of brand new car debt when they turn 18. Typically, you buy a brand new car if you can afford one, and that precludes most teens.
We're telling every kid in high school not born into means that they'll be destitute if they don't go to college.
"I don't know many people who get saddled with $25k of brand new car debt when they turn 18."
Spend some time near a military base. Brand new Mustangs galore. And when you ask the kids who bought them for some details you find out these Lance Corporals are paying like 19% interest. -_- A side-effect of schools not having classes like Home Economics anymore.
That ignores the fact that out of state schools cost on average of double and not every state either has the programs folks are looking for or the schools to go to, so some resort to out of state and pay $20k per year and will walk out with more than twice that in debt.
Also the cost of living around good schools is mostly increasing, at least if they are in an urban environment.
Completely agree schools cost too much and ideally everyone would have lots of options -- talking about loans isn't they way to get there, the problem is the cost of schools and housing skyrocketing.
So, do a cost benefit analysis of whether it’s worth it to go out of state and pay twice as much to study that esoteric subject? You seem to be implying that students in those situations have no choice but to take on more debt, which seems to be a recurring theme in a lot of these threads, but they do.
Or, they can live at home and go to a local community college for the first two years to take the general reqs, and finish up at that expensive 4 year school. A few of my friends did that and saved quite a lot.
Where does this come from? The major one had was game design, another was for IT.
I'm not implying anything. I know people from states who don't have great schools (or programs) available to them and choose to go out of state.
The whole instate/out of state system needs an overhaul as well. Some students want to resettle out of their state and intend to stay after getting their education. That's a net plus for the state, why make it so difficult for them to get an education here if they are academically qualified?
Those are slightly more esoteric/unusual programs. More common would be Computer Science.
Yep, the public university program could definitely use work, no argument there. But I’m under the impression that most states have at least one serviceable university.
Imagine skipping college altogether and getting a blue collar job like plumbing or working your way up to retail management. Imagine that colleges take advantage of egregious, lax loan policies and inflate the price of education to exorbitant amounts.
Reminder to periodically get away from technology and into nature. Take up a hobby like fishing, kayaking or whatever floats your boat. Too much outrage in the world today.
Imagine breaking your body doing blue-collar work only to be deprecated once what you do is inevitably automated, leaving you with no transferrable skills or employment prospects in middle age.
> Imagine breaking your body doing blue-collar work only to be deprecated once what you do is inevitably automated, leaving you with no transferrable skills or employment prospects in middle age.
Man, I wish plumbing was automated. It's not going to happen any time soon though and plumbers will quote exorbitant prices for their work for quite some time.
That's what I ended up doing after having a few unfortunate interactions with local handymen of various specializations. After going through the motions I understood how badly I was ripped off previously
Ever hear of PEX? The labor hours required in new construction is dramatically lower than it was a few years ago.
If you look at plumbing businesses they tend to be getting bigger with lots of entry guys doing monkey work and not so many journeymen.
For more complex work, you get quoted wacky prices because there are few high skill plumbers, and the pain of dealing with homeowner issues is only worth it at a high margin.
Lots of "day laborers" work in construction. And they make decent money but they're not saddled with $200K in student loans. As for factory work, the factory jobs have been largely exported to China. But factory work itself is probably preferable to going into debt to get a four year vanity degree and then end up working at Starbucks.
If you think electrical work or plumbing are still going to be a high-skill job in fifty years then you don't have a good understanding of labor markets. Automation doesn't replace twenty low-skill workers with a robot, it replaces one high-skill worker with two low-skill workers collectively paid half as much.
I was raised by blue collar folks. My grandfather was an electrician and a farmer and lived to be 95. He was still hopping up until he was 93. Another farmer relative died at 99, still owned and ran a retail company when he was 88. Hard work doesn't kill you. And in fact, it's good for your body (within reason. Obviously too much of a good thing can be bad for you...but people aren't getting enough physical activity today).
Come on, you can't really believe the 'my relative lived til...' holds any weight in supporting a position. Like if I can provide examples of 4 hard workers that died in their 40's does that make me more right?
Not trying to be rude but lets hold ourself to better evidence standard on HN.
All that said I 100% that we are dropping standards on physical activity and food quality.
I don't know why people pay for degrees. I never bought one, and I never had a problem with opportunity in my life as a consequence. Imo, the bottom needs to drop out of this market.
"I don't know why people pay for degrees" Because some pursuits in life require them. What about someone who wants to pursue genetics or molecular biology? Those are essential fields that provide things like healthcare and food security.
Yeah, I get that. Those people seem like a minority of the degrees. But even there, I suspect there's probably creative paths through the bureaucracies that don't involve degrees, or push the degree costs onto employers.
The "bottom dropping out" means at minimum a great depression, quite possibly wide-scale violence.
Economists almost always hand-wave away the financial (let alone human) cost of forcing people can switch jobs or careers, then complain people are "irrational actors." I assume they do this because economists are actually bad at economics and so should find jobs more suited to their aptitudes.
What is your advice for the people who are defaulting on the loans because they don’t have enough money to pay them never mind short them?
Remember that previous examples of people rioting over poverty has included literally beheading the rich, en-masse, in a fundamental change of the nature of national governance.
> Remember that previous examples of people rioting over poverty has included literally beheading the rich, en-masse, in a fundamental change of the nature of national governance.
The average student loan debt for the class of 2017 was about as much as the average new car loan. And repayment is limited to 10% of disposable income with forgiveness after 20 years. The whole “crisis” is the projected anxiety of the the relatively small handful of upper middle class people who are actually looking at taking $200k in loans.
Average is misleading. 70% of students borrow, and the average debt is suspiciously similar to the federally backed loan caps.
People incur debts in all sorts of ways for school besides a formal student loan as well. Private loans are expensive and often avoided. Home equity loans are common, as are credit cards for both students and parents.
Edit: You know, I started this comment just wanting to point out the interesting economic relationship of "hours worked to total cost", but apparently got much more rant-y. I'll leave this here as an example of the anxiety I still feel about college, even after 3 years out of it. The important part of the comment is the three of so paragraphs.
=====
Not even less in terms of money. Not even less money adjusted for inflation. Less in terms of time.
This website[0] lets you look at how much time of minimum wage work it would have taken to pay for a college degree in 1987 vs now, Because of vastly inflating tuition prices and relatively stagnant minimum wage, there's a very significant difference.
For the college that I went to, working part time at a minimum wage job not only would have paid for the entirety of tuition, it would have paid 156% of tuition. What I would have had left over would have been more than what my parents paid for the down payment of the house my family of 5 grew up in.
(warning: projection time)
Now I could barely pay half on a part time job, so I either start my adult life with absolutely crushing debt, hope that my parents set aside what would have been way more that the original tuition to cover what would have been left, kill myself trying to work full time and be a student full time, or stunt my career by a few years doing school part time and coming into the workforce years behind in a fairly ageist sector.
And all this for a piece of paper that was pounded into our head that we needed in order to have any kind of hope of getting into even a reasonably basic field.
If you can't tell, I can empathize with why college might give someone depression and anxiety. That's not to mention the general artificial competitiveness of getting into a "good" school, internships, and everything else to make sure that your resume is good enough to even find a job after college, lest you spend a year or two floating and having to explain an every growing gap in your resume. There was also the special bureaucratic that I ended up falling into (though those were just unfortunate circumstances).
I ended up getting the amazing job I have right now by almost pure luck. I know a lot of my classmates that aren't so lucky and have simply very little extra value (other than the worthy pursuit of knowledge and life experience) for the incredibly expensive piece of paper gathering dust in their closet.
Given all the generous payment, deferral, and forbearance plans, student loan debt is a better deal than other types of debt, and unlike consumer debt ,a college degree gains value in term of higher inflation adjusted wages.
Imagine that previous generations paid less for the same hiring opportunities.
Acknowledge that many minimized (or avoided) debt by working their way through school, often doing jobs the current generation considers "beneath" them.
> Students may also avoid using resources on campus because some colleges may expel students who have suicidal ideation ... to avoid liability related to student suicides
My (top tier) school forced me to take a medical leave of absence, which required a doctors note to get back in and finish the degree. A very expensive endeavor.
Edit: Ah, it says that right in the article. Yeah it sucks, I wouldn't trust the schools mental health services again.
I think a huge part of it is that getting a “good” job out of college has never been more competitive and more important. The idea that one works their way up from a secretarial position to executive could not be more unrealistic today. On the other hand, if you beat the competition (your peers) to get a reputable corporate gig at a big co, well known startup, or prestigious consulting or banking you’re setting yourself up for life. Not getting one of those jobs out of college makes it near impossible to be hired at those companies even a year or two down the road simply because many of those companies source all their entry level people from colleges and past interns.
Your trajectory is just so different depending on your first job and I think everyone is acutely aware but no one wants to talk about it.
The well-connected people you are describing will be fine no matter what. The majority of students are the ones who will need to compete for jobs after they graduate.
Totally agree about the getting job part, but as someone who got a job in a big bank as a software developer as well as getting a graduate degree life still sucks.... when not only I feel like a wage slave but my friends who have even better jobs feel like wage slaves and are constantly looking for the next job it’s depressing all around...
That's not really a new thing though. The difference is that previous generations of graduates were happy with what you call "wage slavery" -- a stable job at a big company.
They were probably happy with it because at least it was an option. Not the best option for everyone but at least an option. That option today is rarely the case — Since the late 1980s — and especially now given fleeting corporate entities — there is no longer a sense of commitment. When workers see no commitments they also show little loyalty. It is a downward spiral. Great if you can hop up the spiral (eg right school, right network, right background), but unfortunate otherwise.
I feel like this is family’s fault. A family who is professional/UMC should be able to afford a child not immediately succeeding at getting a top job and staying home while going on interviews etc. If you can’t, admit it and adjust your expectations downward to something realistic instead of demanding the kid walk such a thin rope.
As all of my Japanese friends have told me, students work extremely hard to get into a prestigious college and basically slack off after they get in. The education is not very important because large employers expect to train everyone they hire anyway.
University education in Japan is almost entirely a signaling exercise, and passing the entry exams for prestigious universities is mainly proof that one is willing to work extremely hard to fulfill social expectations.
Oh, and Japan also has a bit of a college affordability problem too.
Overall the Japanese system is not something to emulate.
That's no different to any other country, it is not like student in the Ivy league work so much harder than someone in other decent universities but the most important thing is the signalling.
The Korean practice is similar, according to some essay research I did a few years ago: work dangerously hard to get into a good school, then slack off.
It harkens back to the old Chinese system of civil service examinations (copied somewhat in Korea at least), which were extremely intense and basically the gateway to your future prospects
Korean grad student here. That was actually true for Korean college students when things were prosperous, but since the recessions (one in 1997 and another one in 2008) things have gone worse. There was a time where if you entered the top universities you almost automatically had a decent job, but nowadays students know this isn’t the case anymore. Nowadays even the students in the top universities take pressure with maintaining their GPAs and English exam scores, so I think the situation is a bit different than Japan (although I still think US colleges have more intense workloads, from what I’ve heard...)
I don't know if you read the article but I think the authors clearly state what they think is the issue and it isn't finding your first job.
From the article:
>“It suggests that something is seriously wrong in the lives of young people and that whatever went wrong seemed to happen around 2012, or 2013,” said study coauthor Jean Twenge. She noted that this was around the time smartphones became common and social media moved from being optional to mandatory among youngsters.
>The study wasn’t designed to determine the causes of the increases in mental health issues among college students, though the authors speculate about a variety of possibilities. Smartphone use, for example, has been associated with poorer sleep quality and fewer face-to-face interactions, both of which are deemed essential for mental health, the researchers write in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
Every person with half a brain already knows that smartphones and social media have destroyed at least one generation of Americans. There is a cohort of Gen Z that’s growing up without access to social media; these are the true future leaders of the world. These are the people who will command the income and power over the next 30-40 years.
> smartphones and social media have destroyed at least one generation of Americans.
According to millennials it's the boomers.
According to the boomers it's the millennials.
Meanwhile Gen-X and the Silent generation are observing that everyone; even people who don't use social media directly are affected by the change in how truth is socially constructed.
While I think those that forgo social media while growing up are more likely to have better attention spans and ability to focus, I'd also guess they're just as likely to be significantly socially out of the loop.
This is a bold claim to make without citing anything.
Just based on only my own experiences and perception, the entire news apparatus of the United States seems to have underwent a rapid shift starting approximately in 2013. Outside of only a small handful of venerable institutions like The New York Times, news and social media seem to be merging in a way that is completely changing the character of how important information is delivered to millions of people. It was a shift towards a level of partisanship, hostility, and fear-mongering that, to me at least, has felt utterly unprecedented. Anecdotally, this has caused me a great deal of personal stress, and I've had to become extremely diligent with how I consume news media in order to maintain a healthy state of mind.
I can't help but wonder if the effect of this would've been magnified if were younger, less prepared to deal with it, and just now entering college instead of being half a decade out of college.
This is the right answer. Smartphones aren’t inherently bad, but they enable things that are toxic without us understanding - chief among them the news.
Back in college I thought it was the grown up thing to do to read the news everyday. Fast forward ten years and I’ve finally realized how much frustration and misery the news (Twitter) was bringing into my life.
As of a week and a half ago, I’m now completely off of the news. I deleted the news app, blocked Twitter and FB from Safari, and avoid other news sites. The outcome has been remarkable! My wife continues to remark how much less irritable I’ve become and how much less stressed I seem. I use HN to stay current on industry news, but I can honestly say I don’t miss that other stuff.
To anyone reading this that is hooked on news consumption - try cutting it from your life! It is a life-changing experience.
Almost 10 years ago, I conducted an experiment.
I watched an hour of CNN's every night but it was never that night's coverage. It was from exactly two weeks ago.
It was amazing how much "breaking news!" was irrelevant or just outright wrong, how many large trend predictions were wrong, and how many "[person] will do X" were wrong. While the predictions could have been portrayed as opinions, they were presented as facts and the obvious next steps or conclusions.
I realized pretty quickly that avoiding CNN kept out the blatantly wrong information so even if I didn't replace it with anything, I was net ahead.
A few years ago, I discovered this article and realized that some portion of it was probably on purpose:
It's such a sheltered attitude I see on HN where people talk about just ignoring the news, when you know that you don't have to worry about anything bad happening to you. It's a civic responsibility in a democracy to be informed. Even if you can't influence much with one particular vote depending on where you live, your voice can do a lot (see the NRA).
There's people dying in Yemen from a war that the US is supporting. There are serious debates occurring about the future of the economy which will have massive repercussions. Climate change poses a threat to the stability of civilization. We're coming to a crossroads with government surveillance issues.
It is deeply annoying when I see that people just tune out. You don't need to obsess over the latest 24 hour news cycle, but it's important not to be a personal isolationist for the good of society.
- That assumes the situation is presented without an agenda or - at minimum - a disclosed agenda.
- That the coverage is an accurate - and preferably complete - summary of the situation.
- And that it's clear which details are facts vs assumptions vs conjecture vs conclusions vs whatever.
Unfortunately, we have few of those things at best. There are many ways to be informed, the current media is not a good, useful, or productive way to do that on just about any topic.
Also, additional assumption: that most of the news is in any way actionable or even relevant to your life. In vast majority of cases, it isn't.
People don't read the news to be informed (otherwise they wouldn't tolerate the ridiculously low journalistic standards of today). They consume news because it gives them stuff to talk about with other people. Whether or not the stories are true is irrelevant, as long as everyone hears the same stories. The psychological cost of these stories is, however, unaccounted for.
IME the "news" doesn't report on Yemen, climate change, nor does it critique the economic status quo, so skipping the "news" doesn't mean dropping out.
I remember a generation that grew up with nightmares of nuclear war, Three Mile Island and child kidnappings. Lot of good all that did.
The US has been screwing the Yemen’s of the world for over a century, and the best the todays alt-left can do is tweet about it and watch Chomsky - if they tune RT in.
As this study shows, this is just another generation where the world is all black and white and the news reflects that - in a 280 characters.
I’d suggest what I did - watch/listen/read foreign media for your world and domestic news if you’re really interested. At least you know the bias. Anyone getting their news from US sources is the real definition of an isolationist.
Somehow this post ended up way longer than intended. Apologies, I haven't the time to write a short one! But rather than tuck some link down at the bottom of this post (which I expect many will disagree with), this [1] piece from the Guardian is an absolutely phenomenal article on this exact issue. Now onto the disagreeable!
A major problem with the news is that it thrives on the negative, and you will never run out of bad news. And so it creates a rather severely distorted representation of society. How safe, worldwide, do you think the Earth is today? Is it getting safer or less safe? By approximately how much...? Many people would be completely unable to answer these questions because they focus on nothing but the negative, and so never receive any sort of perspective on the positive.
For instance today we live in what is, by many orders of magnitude, the safest time in our species entire existence. And I mean this worldwide. We literally cannot conceive of how bad things were in the past. For instance during WW2 about 3% of the world was killed. Scaled to today's population that's about 231 million people. Since we suck at intuiting really big numbers let's put that in terms of 9/11s, as it was considered a practically unprecedented scale of destruction given our sweet luxuries of modern times. 2,996 people died there, including the 19 attackers. WW2 had the equivalent of a 9/11 scale event happen every single day for, literally, 211 years.
If your family each has a child, on average, when they're 30. Then your great great great great great grandchildren would all have grown up in a world where every single day of their lives - from birth to death, there was a 9/11 scale event happening. Now compress all of that death and suffering into 6 years!! This is why I'm completely serious that we cannot even conceive of how bad things were in the past. And that's just 3%. The reason I picked it was not it's magnitude, but it's relative recency. The Mongol Hordes wiped out as much as 10% of humanity using little more than arrows and swords, the black death killed about 20% of the world's population, and so on.
---
This doesn't mean you shouldn't care about or should not get involved with contemporary issues. But I do think it's important to put things in perspective. And nearly all issues that we find of critical importance today are, relative to anytime in our species' long past, not that important. It's like from today's perspective if we could look into the future and saw them arguing, vehemently and very seriously, about whether pine or oak should be the normal for city beautification efforts. That seems quite silly from our perspective, yet if you go back in the past nearly all of our issues would seem similar to them.
And I think always focusing on the negative is not good for peoples' mental health. Not just psychological but also their intellectual health. In times past people would get bored and find creative ways to fill that time. In modern times now if you're bored you can click on any news site and there will be numerous new negative article you can obsess about. And your view of the world suggests that not only can you do this, but you should do this as a civic responsibility. Just look at the NYTimes right now. On their front page:
- That Beloved Hospital? It's driving Up Health Care Costs
- My Parents Broke The Rules of the Church Out Of Love
- No One Threatens the Environment Like Donald Trump
- No, Your Kid Shouldn't Get a Gold Star for Reading
- Dogs Will Fix Our Broken Democracy
You'd think this was some cherry picked selection over an extended period of time. No, those are all literally on the front...
>It's such a sheltered attitude I see on HN where people talk about just ignoring the news, when you know that you don't have to worry about anything bad happening to you.
I think it's still a sign of being sheltered one needs to learn about bad things happening to them on the news.
People who are actually affected (as opposed to sheltered), e.g. latino immigrants under Trump, learn about bad shit in real life and/or have relationships with their community where such things are communicated much faster than they hit the media.
Even if someone in the community stop following all media, they will still learn whatever's important. It's the fully isolated and sheltered people who only learn about things from media coverage.
>There's people dying in Yemen from a war that the US is supporting. There are serious debates occurring about the future of the economy which will have massive repercussions. Climate change poses a threat to the stability of civilization. We're coming to a crossroads with government surveillance issues.
Those things are a 10,000 ft view of the news, and everybody that's even partially in society will know about them. You don't need to follow news and social media to know about them and do something about them.
In fact you can directly join an organization about each of them or a party that does what you think is best on all of those, and push it further to your ideas. You don't need to follow what passes as news for that.
In fact if you watch the mainstream news, you'll get a skewed view of all of those issues, with left and right either agreeing (e.g. in warmongering), or playing disagreement theater (e.g. in climate change, the right wants nothing do, the left wants "green new deal", that is to make money off of the climate, with nothing done. The something that needs to be done, of course, being beyond the pale to discuss: slowing down the economy, cutting down on consumption, and so on).
I am being informed, but with the amount of stuff happening every day you need to be selective in the information that you are consuming out of the fire hose.
I read local news from the local paper on local issues, because I'd rather be informed about what happens in my city than the gritty details of the constant horrors that I am personally powerless to affect on the other side of the world.
How do I stop Exxon? How do I stop Raytheon? I already vote straight D. But reading local news taught me about how some of my neighbors are actively helping people in crisis in one of the wealthiest cities on earth. It taught me about how my community leaders are combating climate change. It also taught me how I could get involved in driving local change.
Local news presents issues that I actually have agency to affect. There are pressing issues all over the world at once, so why not focus on the issues in your back yard?
The problem is that if you allow the news to affect you so much that it impairs your mental health, you become less able to do anything to effect positive change in the world, and more easily influenced by the emotionally-charged, manipulative trash that makes up so much of what is presented as news.
If someone's mental health is impaired by exposure to the news, a period of detox is necessary. Consuming more of it won't help them or the rest of the world while they're in that state, and indeed will likely do more harm by perpetuating the cycle.
A person in such a state would be far better off taking some time to improve their ability to discern between useful news and trash, and to become more able to use their knowledge of the news to inspire positive action.
When I’ve stepped away from social media in the past it helped a lot. I got drawn back in because the sports success of my school made Facebook a lot more fun...but I’ve rapidly unfollowed everything on my timeline that is remotely “news like” and it seems to be working.
Nobody has the emotional capacity to handle the anger of every cause from every person they’ve ever met. I saw one meme come through claiming that choosing to stay out of politics was a sign of “privilege” but immediately realized that it’s the exact opposite. Until this new world we lived in happened, every person I’ve ever met didn’t have the ability to broadcast their politics to me unless I saw them in person...and we chose to talk about it one on one like civilized adults.
Wow, that meme is spicy. Another reason to dodge soap opera politics. I've been focusing my news reading on local issues from my local paper and local magazines, things that actually affect me and my neighbors lives. Local reporting is a lot more genuine (but maybe I just have a great local paper).
Following these story lines inspires a lot more hope and respect for my community than any national headline that probably won't affect my life at all.
> and misery the news (Twitter) was bringing into my life.
That's because you were not getting news. You were getting social media. It amazes me that comments here don't distinguish between these. Facebook, twitter, google news, hackernews etc. are not news. They may all use or perhaps disseminate "news" but they are not sources of news.
I mainly used Twitter as my source for news content. I accomplished this by not only following “smart” political people that shared their opinions on things, but also by following most major news organizations as well.
The partisan politics, the faux outrage, the hyped up drama, it’s what drives clicks and ad $ and it’s awful for our mental health.
Following news -- a large city daily paper, CBC, BBC, NPR, ABC (Australia), commercial national television news, local television news -- is much the same.
Information is wrong, irrelevant, intentionally aggrevating, or all of the above. Sometimes more so, sometimes less, but very nearly always.
I'd started buring out on a noncommercial radio news habit by the late 2010s. Yes, that corresponded with an increased use of social media -- mostly Google+ and Reddit, and not Facebook or Twitter. My social life was entirely offline, I've long had the view that the Internet is for acquiring and discussing information, but not personal details.
I began reading more books and articles. And finding that what was revealed through those was that much of what is encountered through news, journalism, and broadcast ... just misses massive amounts of relevant information. You spend so much time caught up in the malinformed focus on the present that you lose any sense of connection with earlier periods and thought, much of which informs the now.
There are exceptions; there always are. But they are the exception, and the bulk of news really isn't worth bothering about. The stuff that is worth bothering about ... generally doesn't make the news.
It's hard to miss the larger stories -- they intrude into discussions and conversations. If that story is something I perceive as not useful to know or engage with I'll state as much. This includes most crime and political stories, to the extent those focus on crisis de jour, immediate and personal impacts, horse race, or some orange running its mouth off.
I'm more interested in deeper undercurrents. My guiding question over the past seven or eight years has been "what are the Big Problems". And information that doesn't address this isn't particularly interesting.
Specific major stories are. I've been following hurricane Dorian, for example, though my entry point to that wasn't news, but the https://earth.nullschool.org weather visualiser, which shows interesting phenomena. And Dorian showed up initially as a minor swirl just off the coast of Venezuela, then developed rapidly. Then it started turning up in news mentions.
I occasionally catch On the Media's weekly deep-dive into major stories of the week, or longer. That's about the right frequency for me to catch up on news, and it's no longer every week.
Mostly I'm looking at larger themes and patterns that repeat through history. Models, frames, context. Philosophy, history, systems theory, cybernetics.
Focusing exclusively on the new and now takes away from that.
I mainly only read local news coverage now from my paper of record (LA times), and a couple local magazines with good journalists. I read less of it (as there really is less of it), but what I do read is more impactful and about the area I live in, and the stories are much more likely to have a tangible impact on my life than whatever national gaffe is being talked about currently in every publication and agency at once.
I don't care that I'm out of the loop on a lot of the national soap opera. The loop is pretty dumb usually and not worth wasting much time on. I loooove reading about local transit projects, housing development, and other local matters on the other hand. That stuff I actually use in my life.
I also only use RSS for content, which really saves me time.
I think a lot of people could stand taking a step back from the national drama and studying local issues more closely.
Totally! I've done a similar thing, but in my case rather than going cold turkey, I've replaced it with a weekly (paper) news magazine. I figure, important things will show up in that, and the rest I don't need to know about. And the experience of reading a paper version is much improved to online, too.
Stopping the use of Facebook, twitter and reddit has lead to a significant improvement in quality of life for me, including sleep, deep work and emotional balance.
I completely agree and do not understand why anybody would choose to post under the actual identity in this day and age. Unless you're completely posturing (which, granted, I find many who post under their own names do) then you're going to piss of somebody, and by somebody I mean quite a lot of people. And in the era of social media lynch mobs, swatting, and all of this other stuff - why would you ever do that to yourself?
I think it's also nice to have your words weighed against themselves rather than against your reputation. When well regarded people are inclined to agree with you because of that, rather than the quality of your words. When a pariah, vice versa. It's also interesting to give misleading hints to ones identity and see how, if at all, that affects response. For instance this account is named rjf72. I expect nearly everybody that noticed that would then assume my first initials are RJF and my birthday is 1972. It's actually just a neutral reference to Robert James Fischer 1972 - the year Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky to become world champ. Granted I suppose that outs me as enjoying the great game, though. That part is true.
At least for me social media was hardly less "mandatory" in the halcyon years of the late 2000s, the thing to have was just Facebook on your computer and not Instagram, which is allegedly the worst type of social media for mental health. Smartphone adoption was clearly rising very fast in 2012-2013 [1] (unfortunately no breakdown by sex / age / income).
It is frustrating to see these issues blamed on "smartphones" at large and not particular usages (Instagram, Tinder, Twitter stand out). I suspect if everyone used their smartphones to read e-books, lookup recipes, text their friends and family, or even just play video games there wouldn't be such a problem.
I fully agree with you that certain uses are by far the worst, but something that smartphones in general have done is remove boredom. And I think there is a reasonable argument to be made that boredom is/was good for mental health, intellectual health, and potentially much more. For instance something my friends and I would do when we were bored kids was to play a sort of homebrew dungeons and dragons with one another, creating impromptu 'choose your own adventure' tales to each other. I'm certain such things were phenomenal for our mental development. Of course that boredom also at times led us to engage in some less wholesome ventures, but it's all part of growing up. But what about now a days? If we were bored and had phones instead we could just go turn on our phone and watch some funny videos, or go play a "free" video game.
I'm certain such arguments were probably made at the advent of radio, television, and other mass media. 'But this time its different!' No, really. The big difference now is that, even as an adult, I could browse YouTube for hours without ever getting bored. Television, radio, and all previous forms of entertainment were all much more limited in their dynamics and content, even with a gazillion channels, meaning boredom was inevitable and often sooner rather than later.
Alongside what's mentioned from this article, there is also now evidence of decreasing IQ in developed nations. And yes, that is after controlling for immigration and other obvious potential confounding factors. [1] This started in the mid 90s, just about the time the internet explosion started making boredom quickly become a thing of the past. What we're seeing in modern times: decreasing IQ, decreasing testosterone, decreasing fertility, increasing obesity, increasing depression, increasing anxiety. It's hard not to see a connection between these and the end of boredom.
"On the other hand, if you beat the competition (your peers) to get a reputable corporate gig at a big co, well known startup, or prestigious consulting or banking you’re setting yourself up for life."
Statements like these reveal so much implicit values/philosophy.
Viewing life - success, output, fulfillment etc - through lenses like this is the issue IMO.
It seems to me that our economy is extremely good at removing meaning from anything. Great many jobs - possibly most - involve being paid for doing arbitrary tasks that become inputs to further arbitrary tasks that make money for someone else. A worker is just a replaceable piece in a vast machinery. And even if you elect to search for meaning on the front lines of value delivery - if you become, say, a doctor, or a fireman - you'll discover your job is as much about helping people as it is about making money and preserving your ability to make money.
I wonder whether it's just the price of progress, of increasing complexity in human organization? As heartbreaking as it is, could it be any different?
>As heartbreaking as it is, could it be any different?
Not if all those 401(k), IRA, and defined benefit pension funds want fat ROIs.
There is something quite humorous about people working hard to earn money to invest, and then those same investments causing them to work even harder to meet their ROIs.
Huh, total US retirement stuff about a year ago was ~$28T, and total US market cap at the same time was ~$30T. Now obviously there's not complete overlap there, because a huge chunk of retirement accounts are not invested in equities at all, and a less huge but still significant chunk is not invested in US equities. However, that means that the remainder is still a massive chunk of all US equities.
I would not have guessed this, given the size of the average person's 401(k). My guess was much smaller. Not sure if I'm worried or relieved to be wrong about that.
It doesn’t matter if it’s equities or debt, once an assumption about growth in the future is made, then if it doesn’t come to pass, it is considered a loss. And who doesn’t like to make rosy assumptions about the future so that they can enjoy life today. Let’s assume 8% returns, so that we can save less and spend more now.
Well...now you have to work harder to make those 8% returns come true. And the savers get screwed too because people (aka government) will opt to pump up the value of equities to make sure the 8% nominal return comes true at the expense of sacrificing the value of the currency.
It's the difference between comfort and a life of struggle. I don't think the majority of college graduates are thinking "I need to be a big swinging dick on wallst to feel good about myself". More likely they are thinking about how they can simply get a home that can't be arbitrarily taken away, or the seeming impossibility of raising a family on a single income. Stuff our parents had, that just seems so far out of reach as to be unattainable.
That is certainly where my financial anxieties lie.
It's not a sentiment of needing to be uber successful for the sake of being successful. It's the fact that not being highly successful often means you can't afford even a crappy home in your city, can't have kids, have a hard time justifying the expense of a vacation, can't pay off massive student loans, can't justify the cost to travel to your home town on holidays to see family, likely won't be able to retire early or even "on time", etc etc etc.
You need to be making way above average in at least 50% of the country to afford those things (yes, many people that can't afford those things still do them, but it will bite them in the ass later).
People like stability. People, on average, have less stability these days.
It's super great for exploitation though. Start companies people! Probably no better time, at least outside the tech industry, workers are cheap.
>Viewing life - success, output, fulfillment etc - through lenses like this is the issue IMO.
Having met people on streets, I can tell you not everyone thinks like this. It's mostly the audience of this site who are high achievers and focused individuals, they need some way to gauge meaningfulness of their lives and this is how they chose to do it.
I've one friend who only plants trees and another friend who is always creating RC vehicles and uploading videos of his experiments on YouTube. They are happy.
I'm not sure I follow. Unemployment rates are at record low. The claim that getting a job out of college "has never been more competitive and more important" seems off to me, coming from someone who witnessed the 2008 depression. Back then, people were concerned with getting a job not just a high-status job.
The number's you're quoting are mostly economic fantasy.
Under-employment is closer, but still fails to account those that have given up hope entirely or who haven't been employed before (but should be working).
The parent isn't just talking about jobs though, they're talking about good jobs that allow for a comfortable life.
Getting a job as a barista isn't tough in this economy, but if you have a law degree from a school that isn't from the top 40 your odds of doing any law work are getting much slimmer; I've met several such people stuck in low paying jobs.
In my father's day a cashier could buy a home in a nice neighborhood (like the bay area) and live comfortably; in large portions of the country that same position now pays poverty wages and homelessness is a constant threat. Life's pretty miserable if you're constantly worried about having a roof over your head or enough food to eat.
And my point is that the delta in the difficulty of getting a good job has been negative. On other words,
> if you have a law degree from a school that isn't from the top 40 your odds of doing any law work are getting much slimmer.
You need to back up this claim. I don't doubt that that you have met people stuck in low paying jobs. But if you're trying to claim that it'd been getting harder to find well paying jobs while the unemployment rate has hit record lows, you're going to need to back up this claim. I was in college during the recession, and my older classmates that graduated in the early 2010s had a much tougher time than I (graduated mid 2010s) did finding a job.
The observation that this pattern of depression and anxiety has risen at the same time that the economy has improved significantly is a strong indicator that the ability to get a job is not the culprit here.
> In my father's day a cashier could buy a home in a nice neighborhood (like the bay area) and live comfortably;
Saying "I just want to live in a nice neighborhood (like the Bay Area)", is like saying "I just want to drive a decent car (like a Lamborghini)."
The Bay Area is absolutely nothing like the vast majority of America, and should be the absolute last place you'd look if your goal is to live a low-stress middle-class life.
The reality is that the median home in America costs $125 per square foot. I don't know how old your father is, but let's say 1973 as the benchmark. The median home then was 1500 square feet. An equivalent home would cost $187 thousand in today's market.
I don't know about cashier, but the average electrician makes $55,000 per year. More than enough to easily afford the $1000/month mortgage needed for the 1973 home your father bought.
Right now there's a desperate shortage of electricians and anyone with a high school diploma and a work ethic can easily move into that career. Nor are we talking about homes in burned out cities or isolated rural communities. Just check listings for Omaha, NE for example. Omaha has one of the strongest job markets in the US, with the third lowest unemployment rate in the country. Plenty of homes at that price with that size can be found in the center of the Omaha metro.
The typical HN audience is massively distorted when it comes to this. By and large the average HN reader lives in one of America's ultra-high-priced metros like the Bay Area, NYC or DC. The average HN reader isn't anything even remotely approaching a middle-class American life.
They're competing in cut-throat winner-take-all games to obtain ultra-prestigious positions at elite startups, FAANGs or Wall Street firms. I'd strongly suspect that the average HN reader making $100k a year "feels" poor, even though that's the top quartile of Americans. (And much higher than that adjusted for the average age of HN.) My guess is that many HNers making $500k+ a year still don't even "feel rich", despite being in the top 1% of Americans.
The point is that the perception of economic conditions found on HN probably tells us about as much about everyday Americans, as the court of Versaille would tell us about the lives of 18th century French peasants.
Im a software engineer earning less than half than what that electrician makes. Constantly being told that I am privileged is chipping away at my mental health little by little.
That's not true at all. There are plenty of folks grinding out wordpress plugins or marketing gizmos for half that. When I was doing those things it took me years to crack $55k. As I got that stability I started looking at skills that were more in demand and less wasteful of my cognitive surplus.
Just looking at unemployment statistics, it does not seem like there should be tougher job-competition from a market-based point of view.
Certainly not in STEM. But other college graduates aren't faring that much worse either. So if competition is a stress factor in this, then it can't be explained by market forces.
What social/wealth class you get into is determined by those factors your said. It’s not a new concept, but it’s one in America we tend to try to pretend it doesn’t exist, because that would be bad for the upper classes.
> The idea that one works their way up from a secretarial position to executive could not be more unrealistic today.
Is it? I would guess that it's much, much easier than 50 years ago or 100 years ago (it's still hard, obviously). It's open to a much wider range of persons. Denying this is intellectually dishonest.
I think it's parenting. Parents started to become overprotective somewhere in the late 90's and it's only getting worse. Kids don't learn to deal with setbacks anymore. So the real world overwhelms them.
There's a book, The Coddling of the American Mind, that explains the problem much better than I do.
"First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life."
I disagree. Parenting is critical but I believe the root is the relationship with smart phones by not only students but everyone else in the students lives (parents/teachers/counselors/other role models). A mixture of constant audio, visual, and social, inputs has lowered our attention spans and rotted our ability to deal with stress in healthy ways (and likely created new stresses simultaneously).
To support this I would cross-reference screen time between 1st world countries and mental health records, normalizing as best I could for all the other variables in the equation.
Smartphones definitely play a role but aren't the main cause. The rise of depression and anxiety started before smartphones were mainstream.
"Comparing groups across generations is admittedly difficult, but the data clearly point to things being far worse now. Trend data clearly suggest increases in levels of stress, depression and anxiety at least since the 1980s. Consider that one study found that the average high school student in the year 2000 has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient did in the 1950s; and those rates have only increased in the last decade. Utilizing the MMPI to assess psychopathology, Twenge and colleagues found five times as many students in 2007 surpassed clinical cutoffs in one or more mental health categories, compared with those who took the measure several decades ago."
Resolving cognitive dissonance through observation, education, reflection and considering the wisdom of others is a necessary step towards inner peace.
For any idea to be meaningful, it should be able to survive challenges. Feelings will betray you. Good and evil are not fundamental universal concepts.
Do you have any recommendations on sources when I can read more about your viewpoint? I craving some inner peace after a month of almost constant fear and anxiety.
Anecdotally, it seems a thing among the younger well-off types all the same, e.g. programmers making 6-figures in their early twenties. Perhaps it’s more of a zeitgeist thing than individual outlook?
Regardless, I think as a problem it’s more mosaic, that to reduce it to any one cause is too reductive.
Well, even if you're making 6 figures your friends and family probably aren't all making 6 figures, are they? I've been working in software for over 10 years but most of the people I grew up with or went to school with are having trouble making ends meet. 6 figures isn't enough to help the people you care about and it's not enough to retire early or have a big enough nest egg to tank something like million dollar medical bills. There's plenty left to be stressed about.
> Well, even if you're making 6 figures your friends and family probably aren't all making 6 figures, are they?
Of the (anecdata) pool I'm sampling from, the most anxious / depressed tended to be the most well-off. Personally, coming from the mixed background / lower-middle side, the non-traditional types seemed to fair better, such that I would anecdotally ascribe value to "blue collar suffering" as providing some measure of anti-fragility. But that's far into speculative territory.
In all honesty I'm fairly anxious, but I also can cope or at least mask as necessary. As I've previously expressed, I'm sure it's more a confluence of factors than any one item causing or precluding.
I think this is a big part of it. If you compared material quality of life among similarly aged groups, you would definitely see a downward trend among young people.
In some ways I think this is due to our ongoing demographic shift. More and more of the US is getting old; old people typically have more assets than young people and need to rely on social security (which young people bear in taxes) and their investments to generate income. I think this is partly contributing to an asset bubble and definitely to the housing shortage (though there are other factors). I don't know if society has ever had a time where more households were not working but still drawing incomes.
There's a lot of talk about comparing your life to others through a false lens. Instagram "influencers" get most of the heat in that discussion.
But I think you're onto one of the core issues - an a much more personal lens. Many (including myself) compare our successes to that of our parents. They were married by 24. Finished Masters degrees by 26. Bought their first house by 30. I can't compare with that.
This is a conservative talking point that's old as time itself. Uncomfortable discussing what's on the news? Complain about the next generation. Compare these two takes:
I wouldn't jump to blaming people of a particular political persuasion because complaining about kids, their loud music and them not walking 100 miles, barefoot and naked in the snow is as old as time itself. Right/left is divide-and-conquer nonsense; solidarity amongst regular people is far more important.
I was referring to conservatism in the sense of being reactionary (which is indeed as old as at least technology, one of my favorite books is Fathers and Sons). Many if not most democrats certainly fit the bill. I certainly agree with the need for solidarity!
It's much more than not learning to deal with setbacks, it's that we've been robbed of the ability to exercise our will on the world, and we cling to any scrap of meaningful freedom we can find.
My gut feeling is telling me you're right. Parenting has gone terribly wrong in the last 20 years. No matter what the kids do, they always tell them "good job", even when they are complete losers. They become so soft and iresistant to failure. Then we put them to hugely stressfull environments, where they are facing failures. Then we give them social media and other confusing propaganda (like LGBTI+ trendy movement these days) and in the case of US, we give them guns. I am not surprised at all actually.
I have no idea what the GP thread wrote, but it seems it was probably off base. In general: Nowadays, I believe there is a subtle and misguided conflation between a rare few, loud, victim-hierarchy-obsessive crybullies trying to impose collective outcomes with selective, collective punishment of "perpetrator groups" (possibly referred to as SJWs) with greater numbers of people who have legitimate, historical persecutions and casual, recurring bias harm (those who needed and try to maintain actual social justice without bothering people beyond what's essential).
There's a setting to turn on flagged/dead comment viewing, which I find very helpful. I feel like many don't realize the underbelly HN has, and I think many should.
> Kids don't learn to deal with setbacks anymore. So the real world overwhelms them.
It doesn't sound like you interact with many "kids" these days. As someone surrounded mostly by them, I can assure you none of this is true. Sad to see this upvoted so highly and especially sad to see people pointing out this is a long brought up conservative talking point with no evidence downvoted. I thought we got over this myth 10 years ago. Yet people still want to yell at Mr. Rodgers for caring about child psychology and being on the forefront of mental health in a real way...
Perhaps one should look to the external world these people are coming into for answers. Climate change, the economy, and the political climate with hateful policies against many people over the world in many countries.
Not to mention that mental health being destigmatized raises statistical reporting rates as people are simply more open about it.
But yeah, let's blame bad parenting that people first accused millennials of when no millennials are even left in the post high school college population.
I agree with those saying climate change is a huge stressor for young generations. I had the same argument with a friend about fear of nuclear war into the 80's, but she convinced me it wasn't the same. They are both existential fears, but nuclear war was something that only the military could make happen, and as long as it didn't happen, life could go on as usual (well not really, we know now). Whereas climate change is happening slowly but surely all around and everyone will have to change their behavior to avoid it.
My wife and I cannot talk about climate change around our kids because they understand how scary it is and we see their fear about the consequences.
I think this, in some way, can be interpreted in a way favorable to the original parent's comment. Kids being stressed by climate change to the point that their feelings overwhelm all of their coping mechanisms is not an effective strategy for actually fixing the root cause.
Ideally, kids would develop, by trial and error, effective strategies for identifying solvable problems and dealing with them, and not being extremely negatively affected by (directly) unsolvable problems. It would be beneficial for society if people heard about climate change and thought, "Okay, that won't be good, so what are some things I can do in the short term and in the long term to make a positive impact?" The great thing about such an approach is that it's omni-applicable, such as when one's car breaks down on a long drive, etc.
Parents who constantly hover around their kids presumably interfere with this vital process, perhaps because these important lessons can only be discovered, not forcibly taught.
To me this is akin to saying that kids under slavery need to learn coping strategies. Yes, it could help, but there is no reason to think it would counteract the inherent effect of their environment - and it lays the blame in entirely the wrong place.
I think this is true and very valid criticism against these point "ancient civilizations" had allegedly figuered out, but I do believe that the strive to more safety/control is indeed making people crazy. Not a bit excentric, but batshit accute insane crazy.
There is no rational evaluation of real dangers and this irrationality is one, if not the most prominent, driving factors for policy. Hell, people are scared because of tweets and mass surveillance is implemented with justifications an occult voodoo mom would get a red face for.
What do you expect to get from police checks in front of schools? And people wonder about school shooters? Seriously?
It's the same arguement used for smacking a child. "I was smacked and I turned alright...except for my short temper and using that anger to discipline my child the same way my parents did, who could never be wrong, obviously."
Or it could be that people are more aware of their internal states. In other words, twenty years ago, I would not be able to tell you that I had anxiety or depression, even though I did. As I went through cognitive behavioral therapy and became more aware of my internal states, I can tell immediately if I start to feel anxious or depressed. Due to cb therapy, I experience far less anxiety and depression but I am aware of it when I do experience it (which can help minimize it).
European students who are not under crushing debt are also having difficulties with such mental health problems. The root of the anxiety and the following depression is economic prospects and the terrible status quo.
Fair, although I expect you'd find less of it. The feeling of "I am literally going to die owing this, I will never be free" isn't doing anyone but the loan-owners any favours.
In the end it's not a pissing contest by any means. The factors contributing to the mental issues of European students might be different than the Americans', but the overall trend is apparent for both demographics.
Sadly enough, the environmental pressures faced in terms of economic situation and extreme competition have been observed for a very long time in Asian nations, exhibiting themselves in the form of suicides. I hope, deeply so, that the West does not devolve that far...
Indeed. In Europe we still have huge issues with declining home ownership, youth unemployment and precarious/low-paid jobs (incl. the 'gig economy') etc.
I did okay-ish (home ownership still seems impossible), but when I see some of my high school and uni friends stuck in bad jobs with seemingly little hope of escape you can understand the despair.
I thought about this a lot. It's my belief that it's similar to porn decreasing sex. You can get fulfillment from media that's like actual sex, it'll make an impact.
In the end it screws up our incentive systems by fulfilling our natural urges. We dull our loneliness with the internet in the short term, ending up with greater loneliness in the long term. There's been a lot of reports of loneliness rising rising pretty dramatically. Debt on the other hand is falling as a percentage of gdp: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HDTGPDUSQ163N
IMO internet consumption is in the same category of addictive vice as drugs, gaming/gambling, drinking (which is just drugs tbh), etc. It's a short term simulation of successfully achieving our body's goals. It's fake and interferes with our actual success.
Could it be the increasing inequality in the United States? The elimination of most middle class jobs? The increasingly generational inheritance of wealth, power, and connections? College debt? Asking for a friend.
I can't imagine the debt students are taking on now. Add to that the high expense of housing. Why don't student speak up about this instead of defending all the "safe space" and "trigger warning" nonsense?
I'm not Gen Z myself (millenial who graduated right before asking for pronouns became a thing on college campuses), but that's a question I've asked myself as I well.
I get the feeling that it's simply because they believe they have leverage over the words people use on their campus, but no leverage over housing expenses or other economic issues that actually have broader appeal.
Remember that neither Gen Z nor Millenials have ever witnessed significant economic change that was brought on by direct action of normal people. Unions have been utterly defanged and left-wing candidates never manage to win or drive change either. Occupy Wall Street was the closest thing we've ever seen to an economic solidarity movement, and that was widely mocked and derided as an utter failure.
While the movement around language policing may give Gen Z the feeling of participating in successful direct action, it unfortunately is contributing to a schism between them and older generations who may be otherwise willing to ally with them on broader causes, but are fearful of mis-stepping and being called out publicly.
Of course, maybe that very same fear of public call-outs ties back to what one of the professors in the article mentioned. The new generation is used to having every little thing they do be potentially subjected to being recorded, publicized, and criticized at any moment through social media. They are constantly self-managing themselves and their social media presence with that in mind. They don't see why older generations shouldn't be held to the same standards - even if they'd rather be exempt from that standard themselves, they accept it as reality.
There's a mockumentary series on netflix called "American Vandal", which besides being funny, was surprisingly insightful about the challenges that young adults are facing in part due to growing up with instagram, twitter, etc. as part of their world. I have a lot more sympathy for them after watching that.
>Remember that neither Gen Z nor Millenials have ever witnessed significant economic change that was brought on by direct action of normal people.
Did you forget about the Great Recession and it’s economic impact? Do you believe it didnt bring significant economic change or is it that it wasn’t brought on by normal people? What exactly defines normal people in this context or better yet, how is that relevant?
It’s confusing to me that despite the soaring costs of housing, the hyper competitive job market ( kids compete not just against other Americans but also students from other countries like India and China, where many of those immigrant kids didn’t have the crushing college debt), the shrinking middle class, and general deregulation that has shifted power to the wealthy - despite all these issues, your view point of what affects these kids is based around social media or more specifically, what standard these kids are held to on social media.
Of course I remember the great recession - I mentioned Occupy. It was the banks which caused the great recession. The politicians then responded to the needs of the banks, not the people. There were some regulations around lending added to protect banks from themselves, and a small stimulus package that most of my generation didn't even receive. The average person though did not see anything change meaningfully to make their economic situation better. So both the change it brought was insignificant to the working class (aka "normal people"), and the working class had no say over what changes were even discussed (because Occupy was not taken seriously).
I agree with you on the importance of all those issues. My point is that we have a large number of young people who are disillusioned with both the current economic situation AND lacking confidence in historic tactics (ie, direct action) that the working class used in the past to improve economic situations (ie, joining a union, going on strike, electing leftist officials).
The neo-liberal philosophy that has been sold to Americans for the past few decades teaches people that you are supposed to be able to effect change by choosing with your wallet and advocating by mouth. This too is proving to be ineffectual for meaningful change, but the concept does relate to my greater point: the most powerful currency accessible to this generation is social capital. It accumulates fast and spreads to all corners when it resonates. Social capital is the only reason Trump could become president. It's making and breaking careers (see the rise of "influencers" and streamers), and it's playing out comparitively microscopic level as young people are using modern communication frameworks to define their success in their personal social spheres.
I'm not saying this is a good development. It does distract and divide the working class from one-another. But I see why it happened, and don't think it's apathy or selfishness that has caused this way of thinking to become popular. Either the young generation will reject their hyper-connected "always-on" culture, or the older ones will get on board. Until then it will be hard to work together on bigger issues, and I doubt Gen Z can solve those alone.
I somewhat agree that identity politics has come to the forefront because class politics has been in retreat since the 70s, but simply because we are increasingly recognizing the importance of class politics, doesn't mean that we shouldn't embrace the liberation of trans folk and other non-class based oppressions.
the rich and powerful are only allowing females of the lower class to participate in higher education. this study is more about the expansion of working class females, especially the minority ones, with regards to the demographic of undergraduates. they are depressed due their isolation.
American culture has become a dysfunctional parody of itself, and young people are left to grapple with a worldview that does not seem to adequately address the world.
This x 100. Most of Gen Z has become absurdist (memes only make sense to young people often for this reason) out of necessity. The "adults" have failed them and they have no power to change it. Depression and anxiety should only be expected.
There really should also be more discussion about the complexity of the world and decision fatigue, both of which I think are affecting people of all ages but especially younger people.
First, "American culture" is a very loose and nebulous term at best, and an attempt to straw-man all your opponents at once at worst. America is a very large and very diverse nation; please be a little clearer as to which culture you are referring, or to which attributes thereof.
Secondly, to what worldview are you referring, and what does it not adequately address?
TL;DR: people sharing their angst inside filter bubbles causes unrealistic expectations from questionable sources
I think, thanks to social media classic socialization among students via social events and clubs has ceased. Person to person interaction isn't a thing anymore, but it's necessary to learn having realistic expectations. Most people crave interaction, comparison, sharing experiences with others, this is normal. With social media it's a two-fold problem: much more people are involved in comparisons (likes, followers), so having little or no followers doesn't help feeling worthy, and the expectation having to have followers at all is unreasonable and unrealistic. The depression is based on doubts that one has any significance in the world, plus, having to keep up with competition. Then there is fear of missing out that drives anxiety like wildfire.
There's pressure from everywhere, even internal. Why wasn't
it that big a thing back then? Because personal expectations weren't as bloated then as they are now, and today's young people derive their expectations of themselves (what they think they ought to be, to do) and expectations of others (what they think they can expect from others) from the Internet, forums, social networks mostly, not from personal experience. That is it. Personal physical experience once provided the basis for expectations, people had to learn everything themselves. But now people learn expectations from other peoples' experiences, and not their own. So, today the unrealistic expectations of other people are failing on us, naturally, and we are confronted with the reality of things and people. This is what it feels like leaving one's favorite Twitter filter bubble and learning that the actual world is different and much more complicated.
And I didn't mention the job market yet, because I think it's just a part in the pool of sources of pressure. Anxiety about one's job isn't as new as people think. The awareness is different now, because people share their angst and amplify it via the social media making it even worse. Social media, job situation, pressure are all parts of the same problem - unrealistic expectations from questionable sources.
“It suggests that something is seriously wrong in the lives of young people and that whatever went wrong seemed to happen around 2012, or 2013,” said study coauthor Jean Twenge. She noted that this was around the time smartphones became common and social media moved from being optional to mandatory among youngsters.
I just...OMG who the hell are these people. Maybe the economy just stopped getting better for most people after 2008? I mean duh. After a few years when finally becomes obvious that the new normal is gig economy jobs and living under debt until you die, say around 2012-2013, then people's happiness starts to nose dive. That's a much more explanatory answer than "the cell phones did it".
It's like an old person - I thought she was a baby boomer, but she's only 48 - that has a phd (and everything!) is desperately trying to figure out what's going wrong, and they have all the data.
They. Just. Can't. Quite. Get There.
This is the type of person that's running society, maybe that's the problem. Face palm.
I think we are more aware of depression than we ever have been but it has been going on for much longer than millennials or gen z. The _value_ that each individual seeks in life cannot be found in this modern world. I think that's due to both fewer human connections and a lack of purpose from some passionate skill or trade - more value placed on high social status determined by virtual numbers, your _perceived_ life, and consumerism.
We have vastly increased wealth, and now every college student owns a credit card, a smartphone, high speed internet, nice clothes, and has a far higher likelihood of landing a good job with savings compared to 50 years ago. Or even compared to graduates in poorer countries.
Maybe there's a mismatch between wealth and happiness.
Today's kids are essentially experiments. Being connected to the modern internet from as early as age zero is going to have some very serious side effects, and I don't believe parents understand that. This is especially bad if the parents don't have the understanding or ability to keep the child's experienced age appropriate.
> ...both depression and anxiety are extremely treatable.
When did that happen? As someone who has undergone treatment for many years and read a lot of the literature, the long-term success rates for treatment of depression are mediocre, at best.
Some mainstream treatment approaches can be somewhat effective for some people. Maybe they can be completely effective for some people. I'm not going to argue the toss on that.
But there's a significant cohort of people for whom these conditions do not respond well to conventional treatment, at least to the extent of full recovery.
I'm one of those people.
We're talking about at least 19 years of dealing with anxiety, and plenty of depression along the way. Some medications have been moderately effective at abating some of the symptoms, but not at bringing about anything approximating complete recovery and a "normal" life.
What has been effective for me is a long-term program involving a combination of subconscious emotional healing techniques, as well as various physiological healing methods, including:
- detoxification of heavy metals (including lead, mercury, aluminium),
- increasing/balancing levels of critical nutrients (particularly minerals - calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, iron and zinc, as well as iodine, which is critically low in many people with complex health problems, due to its crucial role in thyroid function, and which is insufficient in may people's diets, particularly in western countries),
- regularly engaging in the right kinds of exercise (stretching and core strength exercises like yoga/pilates), and moderate (definitely not strenuous) cardio exercise like brisk walking.
After about 8 years of that I'm almost fully recovered, I think and desperately hope.
But you won't get recommendations for any of these approaches from a conventional psychologist or psychiatrist, and if you were to ask one about them you'd get laughed out of the clinic.
Thus, many people continue to suffer, even after years of treatment from mainstream practitioners.
The nudging towards concellors might be correct, but I doubt reality can match expectations. It is not that you could pay sum x to the therapist of your choice and you will be mentally healthy again.
It can result in you just getting drugged enough in many cases. It would be interesting to know how these problems manifest in the first place.
Until then I would say your assesment is probably wrong.
Does it really matter what the causes of the depression and anxiety are if there is no easy way to change them (global warming, debt, parody of a government, news that's hyperbole not information, overwhelming technology, world competition, and so on)? None of those are going away, so the emphasis needs to be on taking care of the the young people (or all people) stressed by these factors.
What to do? Anecdotally, I can certainly say that lessening exposure to these things really helps. But not everyone has the environment or self control to do such things.
I'm a big believer in social media being toxic for many people. I see the core problems as it pushes life views to the extremes.
Its full of posts of 'see how great my life is' or 'see how bad the world is'. This combined with a media intergrated into our lives almost real-time whose organisations are all looking to maximise our attention.
We used to go through the world in a much simpler bubble and get our half hours news window on TV or newspaper in the morning. And being connected to the wider journeys of people for more realistic expectations e.g. rather than seeing someone post a picture of a great car saying 'how good is this' you also got to see they had been working and saving hard for a few years.
Ive thought about this a bunch and dont know how we can deal with it better. I cant see social media going away. I tried one of those apps that shows the screen time you spend but it didnt really change habits for me. I mentioned to my partner the other day that we should consider setting on weekend day as a screen free day.
I really think this is somethign important for society to work on.
> Its full of posts of 'see how great my life is' or 'see how bad the world is'. This combined with a media intergrated into our lives almost real-time whose organisations are all looking to maximise our attention.
For a long time I thought "FOMO" was just a trendy bit of slang that hit the nail on the head nicely, but it's actually a documented psychological phenomenon (though I don't know which came first).
Ever since I learned about it, I've basically trained myself to not check social media often and, when I do, to remind myself that the pieces I see of other people's lives aren't representative of their lives as a whole, nor are they representative of what I should be expecting or enjoying from my own life. It's helped a little.
Traditional media (news) is also toxic. For the last few months I stopped consuming it and my level of happiness and life satisfaction has gone up tremendously. I don't consume social media at all unless you count hn. I highly recommend that people try this. The occasional traditional news articles on hn are the only exception but generally I avoid them and never dig further. I haven't missed out on anything important. The news is mostly irrelevant and imo, harmful to one's everyday life. After all, it makes me feel helpless and hopeless. I can't change politics or politicians or disasters or crime or whatever. Watching the news just creates anger and anxiety over things that are purely out of my control. Fuck that.
Although I am not a college student, something that causes worry for me is the difficulty of knowing what is going on and what to believe, even though I consume news from many sources. The battle for readers/viewers' attention has escalated to manipulative tactics like clickbait or pandering. The slow demise of old media has created a sense of desperation in their reportage. New media RARELY seeks a footing of disinterested journalism. This adds a struggle to the experience of "adulting" for college kids.
Another issue is the change in the number of people living here. 1990 had 250MM. 2018 had 327MM. That 30% increase is bound to add stress and conflict.
Another: the pace of change has been overwhelming in the last 25 years. That might create self-doubt about one's capacity to keep skills updated.
Another: the decrease in life expectancy of white middle class people due to overdose and suicide. The plague of suicide is the message of futility and nihilism for survivors to absorb.
Prosperity cures a multitude of ills. Widespread under-employment brings every bruise, boil, laceration, and trauma to the forefront. College students see the employment landscape. They face competition from citizens and non-citizens, and thus a pie that gets divided among a bigger denominator.
The economic reality is that college is necessary for skilled occupations. Parents steer their kids into college, even though some of those kids don't have the self-management skills to succeed in college. If they do have these skills, they commonly are allowed to take coursework that is bound to result in a minimum wage job. This mortgages the first 20 working years of their adult lives with student loan debt service. I would certainly be discouraged by this prospect.
Lastly, the disconnect in authentic relationships that social media fostered took away a piece of the fundamental human safety net.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] threadImagine that previous generations paid less for the same hiring opportunities.
Here's some stats: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/13/facts-about...
Median bachelors degree debt: $25,000
Most of these people with huge debts are getting graduate degrees and they significantly skew the results when looking at the average, the median is far more insightful.
If that $25k is public loans, which it should be since that's well under the limit, the uncertainty should be mitigated by income based repayment plans. You'll never have to pay more than 10% of your disposable income (income over 1.5x the federal poverty level).
If anything I think the feeling of doom is caused by people constantly telling kids how bad student debt is without realizing that $25k in public loans and $200k in private loans are vastly different situations. Most younger people I know feel guilty about taking out $25k in loans to make hundreds of thousands more over their life time.
1. Future reward should be discounted, usually by a fairly large constant, because of interest and risk. Also, in many fields, most of those extra hundreds will come toward the end of a career. So, highly discounted.
2. I wonder if it's really a good idea to set up a society where banks that provide educational loans are able to capture huge percentages of future productivity. Seems like this would have all sorts of really negative outcomes. Some of those negative outcomes are already happening -- e.g., we effectively import 90+% of our scientific human capital because US students aren't willing to do phds.
We realize that allowing financiers to capture a big chunk of the rewards for K-12 ed is a bad idea. Why don't we realize that the same is true for college?
2. Public loans are over 90% of disbursements, and if you're only borrowing $25k you're definitely getting public loans. Public loans are made directly from the treasury. No banks involved.
Also most stem phds work as researchers and teachers--they generally aren't paying tuition.
Whether it's banks or other taxpayers or recipients of other entitlement programs is, I guess, a bit of a red herring wrt the point I was trying to make.
The question is about the knock-on effects of squeezing an entire generation for some chunk of what they're worth before they even enter the job market.
Again, I think the K-12 analogy is the best way of communicating the point I'm trying to make. Why don't we also charge high school students $10K @ 4% instead of paying for high school through taxes? Well, because that would be a huge net negative for society.
> Also most stem phds work as researchers and teachers--they generally aren't paying tuition.
I have a stem phd :). I was referring to the huge opportunity cost re: delayed earnings. US students opting out of phds because they have huge student debt to service is a real thing. This is true even when the phd would undoubtedly increase lifetime earnings (e.g., students from no-name schools turning down CMU/MIT/Berkeley/Standford phd acceptance letters for mid five figure salaries).
If it would undoubtedly increase life time earnings it's a stupid decision to turn it down because of undergrad student loans. That makes absolutely no sense.
>red herring
I was taking your post at face value. It lamented allowing financiers to capture value.
I'm also not against tax payer funded college. But the loan system we have in the US combined with income based repayment is not as bad as people think it is. Mostly people just don't understand income based repayment and public vs. private loans.
Would it be better if students didn't owe money after college? Yes. Is the student loan debt equivalent of a new midrange Toyota Camry a life-crushing burden? No, not really.
It might or might not be a life-crushing burden for individuals. But it's still an incredibly risky burden for a fragile economy.
And personally I don't find "And don't even think about a graduate degree unless you want to end up with >$40k" all that reassuring for those with postgrad talent and ambitions.
Professional schools (law, medicine, MBA, etc.) are different, but they also cost way more than $40k.
We're telling every kid in high school not born into means that they'll be destitute if they don't go to college.
The two are not comparable.
Spend some time near a military base. Brand new Mustangs galore. And when you ask the kids who bought them for some details you find out these Lance Corporals are paying like 19% interest. -_- A side-effect of schools not having classes like Home Economics anymore.
Also the cost of living around good schools is mostly increasing, at least if they are in an urban environment.
Or, they can live at home and go to a local community college for the first two years to take the general reqs, and finish up at that expensive 4 year school. A few of my friends did that and saved quite a lot.
Where does this come from? The major one had was game design, another was for IT.
I'm not implying anything. I know people from states who don't have great schools (or programs) available to them and choose to go out of state.
The whole instate/out of state system needs an overhaul as well. Some students want to resettle out of their state and intend to stay after getting their education. That's a net plus for the state, why make it so difficult for them to get an education here if they are academically qualified?
Yep, the public university program could definitely use work, no argument there. But I’m under the impression that most states have at least one serviceable university.
Reminder to periodically get away from technology and into nature. Take up a hobby like fishing, kayaking or whatever floats your boat. Too much outrage in the world today.
Man, I wish plumbing was automated. It's not going to happen any time soon though and plumbers will quote exorbitant prices for their work for quite some time.
My town though thinks only a person who has completed a three years apprenticeship is allowed to install a new electric outlet.
That's what I ended up doing after having a few unfortunate interactions with local handymen of various specializations. After going through the motions I understood how badly I was ripped off previously
If you look at plumbing businesses they tend to be getting bigger with lots of entry guys doing monkey work and not so many journeymen.
For more complex work, you get quoted wacky prices because there are few high skill plumbers, and the pain of dealing with homeowner issues is only worth it at a high margin.
Tradesman != Day laborers or low skill factory work.
Not trying to be rude but lets hold ourself to better evidence standard on HN.
All that said I 100% that we are dropping standards on physical activity and food quality.
Economists almost always hand-wave away the financial (let alone human) cost of forcing people can switch jobs or careers, then complain people are "irrational actors." I assume they do this because economists are actually bad at economics and so should find jobs more suited to their aptitudes.
Remember that previous examples of people rioting over poverty has included literally beheading the rich, en-masse, in a fundamental change of the nature of national governance.
I'm in
People incur debts in all sorts of ways for school besides a formal student loan as well. Private loans are expensive and often avoided. Home equity loans are common, as are credit cards for both students and parents.
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Not even less in terms of money. Not even less money adjusted for inflation. Less in terms of time.
This website[0] lets you look at how much time of minimum wage work it would have taken to pay for a college degree in 1987 vs now, Because of vastly inflating tuition prices and relatively stagnant minimum wage, there's a very significant difference.
For the college that I went to, working part time at a minimum wage job not only would have paid for the entirety of tuition, it would have paid 156% of tuition. What I would have had left over would have been more than what my parents paid for the down payment of the house my family of 5 grew up in.
(warning: projection time)
Now I could barely pay half on a part time job, so I either start my adult life with absolutely crushing debt, hope that my parents set aside what would have been way more that the original tuition to cover what would have been left, kill myself trying to work full time and be a student full time, or stunt my career by a few years doing school part time and coming into the workforce years behind in a fairly ageist sector.
And all this for a piece of paper that was pounded into our head that we needed in order to have any kind of hope of getting into even a reasonably basic field.
If you can't tell, I can empathize with why college might give someone depression and anxiety. That's not to mention the general artificial competitiveness of getting into a "good" school, internships, and everything else to make sure that your resume is good enough to even find a job after college, lest you spend a year or two floating and having to explain an every growing gap in your resume. There was also the special bureaucratic that I ended up falling into (though those were just unfortunate circumstances).
I ended up getting the amazing job I have right now by almost pure luck. I know a lot of my classmates that aren't so lucky and have simply very little extra value (other than the worthy pursuit of knowledge and life experience) for the incredibly expensive piece of paper gathering dust in their closet.
[0]: https://www.marketwatch.com/graphics/college-debt-now-and-th...
Given all the generous payment, deferral, and forbearance plans, student loan debt is a better deal than other types of debt, and unlike consumer debt ,a college degree gains value in term of higher inflation adjusted wages.
anyone thinks about robots?
Edit: Ah, it says that right in the article. Yeah it sucks, I wouldn't trust the schools mental health services again.
Your trajectory is just so different depending on your first job and I think everyone is acutely aware but no one wants to talk about it.
Even at the best schools (especially at the best?) it is a lot about family/friend relationships, corruption (ymmv by field).
That's an interesting point as opposed to the over-observed fragility of modern college students.
There's probably something to be learned from the different school and employment bottlenecks in Japan.
University education in Japan is almost entirely a signaling exercise, and passing the entry exams for prestigious universities is mainly proof that one is willing to work extremely hard to fulfill social expectations.
Oh, and Japan also has a bit of a college affordability problem too.
Overall the Japanese system is not something to emulate.
It harkens back to the old Chinese system of civil service examinations (copied somewhat in Korea at least), which were extremely intense and basically the gateway to your future prospects
From the article:
>“It suggests that something is seriously wrong in the lives of young people and that whatever went wrong seemed to happen around 2012, or 2013,” said study coauthor Jean Twenge. She noted that this was around the time smartphones became common and social media moved from being optional to mandatory among youngsters.
>The study wasn’t designed to determine the causes of the increases in mental health issues among college students, though the authors speculate about a variety of possibilities. Smartphone use, for example, has been associated with poorer sleep quality and fewer face-to-face interactions, both of which are deemed essential for mental health, the researchers write in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
According to millennials it's the boomers.
According to the boomers it's the millennials.
Meanwhile Gen-X and the Silent generation are observing that everyone; even people who don't use social media directly are affected by the change in how truth is socially constructed.
This is a bold claim to make without citing anything.
Social networking is inherently a net negative due to how information propagates. It’s actively weeding out the useful bits.
I can't help but wonder if the effect of this would've been magnified if were younger, less prepared to deal with it, and just now entering college instead of being half a decade out of college.
Back in college I thought it was the grown up thing to do to read the news everyday. Fast forward ten years and I’ve finally realized how much frustration and misery the news (Twitter) was bringing into my life.
As of a week and a half ago, I’m now completely off of the news. I deleted the news app, blocked Twitter and FB from Safari, and avoid other news sites. The outcome has been remarkable! My wife continues to remark how much less irritable I’ve become and how much less stressed I seem. I use HN to stay current on industry news, but I can honestly say I don’t miss that other stuff.
To anyone reading this that is hooked on news consumption - try cutting it from your life! It is a life-changing experience.
Almost 10 years ago, I conducted an experiment. I watched an hour of CNN's every night but it was never that night's coverage. It was from exactly two weeks ago.
It was amazing how much "breaking news!" was irrelevant or just outright wrong, how many large trend predictions were wrong, and how many "[person] will do X" were wrong. While the predictions could have been portrayed as opinions, they were presented as facts and the obvious next steps or conclusions.
I realized pretty quickly that avoiding CNN kept out the blatantly wrong information so even if I didn't replace it with anything, I was net ahead.
A few years ago, I discovered this article and realized that some portion of it was probably on purpose:
https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...
There's people dying in Yemen from a war that the US is supporting. There are serious debates occurring about the future of the economy which will have massive repercussions. Climate change poses a threat to the stability of civilization. We're coming to a crossroads with government surveillance issues.
It is deeply annoying when I see that people just tune out. You don't need to obsess over the latest 24 hour news cycle, but it's important not to be a personal isolationist for the good of society.
- That assumes the situation is presented without an agenda or - at minimum - a disclosed agenda.
- That the coverage is an accurate - and preferably complete - summary of the situation.
- And that it's clear which details are facts vs assumptions vs conjecture vs conclusions vs whatever.
Unfortunately, we have few of those things at best. There are many ways to be informed, the current media is not a good, useful, or productive way to do that on just about any topic.
People don't read the news to be informed (otherwise they wouldn't tolerate the ridiculously low journalistic standards of today). They consume news because it gives them stuff to talk about with other people. Whether or not the stories are true is irrelevant, as long as everyone hears the same stories. The psychological cost of these stories is, however, unaccounted for.
Your money can do a lot more - see the NRA.
I remember a generation that grew up with nightmares of nuclear war, Three Mile Island and child kidnappings. Lot of good all that did.
The US has been screwing the Yemen’s of the world for over a century, and the best the todays alt-left can do is tweet about it and watch Chomsky - if they tune RT in.
As this study shows, this is just another generation where the world is all black and white and the news reflects that - in a 280 characters.
I’d suggest what I did - watch/listen/read foreign media for your world and domestic news if you’re really interested. At least you know the bias. Anyone getting their news from US sources is the real definition of an isolationist.
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/may/03/how-the-news-to...
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A major problem with the news is that it thrives on the negative, and you will never run out of bad news. And so it creates a rather severely distorted representation of society. How safe, worldwide, do you think the Earth is today? Is it getting safer or less safe? By approximately how much...? Many people would be completely unable to answer these questions because they focus on nothing but the negative, and so never receive any sort of perspective on the positive.
For instance today we live in what is, by many orders of magnitude, the safest time in our species entire existence. And I mean this worldwide. We literally cannot conceive of how bad things were in the past. For instance during WW2 about 3% of the world was killed. Scaled to today's population that's about 231 million people. Since we suck at intuiting really big numbers let's put that in terms of 9/11s, as it was considered a practically unprecedented scale of destruction given our sweet luxuries of modern times. 2,996 people died there, including the 19 attackers. WW2 had the equivalent of a 9/11 scale event happen every single day for, literally, 211 years.
If your family each has a child, on average, when they're 30. Then your great great great great great grandchildren would all have grown up in a world where every single day of their lives - from birth to death, there was a 9/11 scale event happening. Now compress all of that death and suffering into 6 years!! This is why I'm completely serious that we cannot even conceive of how bad things were in the past. And that's just 3%. The reason I picked it was not it's magnitude, but it's relative recency. The Mongol Hordes wiped out as much as 10% of humanity using little more than arrows and swords, the black death killed about 20% of the world's population, and so on.
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This doesn't mean you shouldn't care about or should not get involved with contemporary issues. But I do think it's important to put things in perspective. And nearly all issues that we find of critical importance today are, relative to anytime in our species' long past, not that important. It's like from today's perspective if we could look into the future and saw them arguing, vehemently and very seriously, about whether pine or oak should be the normal for city beautification efforts. That seems quite silly from our perspective, yet if you go back in the past nearly all of our issues would seem similar to them.
And I think always focusing on the negative is not good for peoples' mental health. Not just psychological but also their intellectual health. In times past people would get bored and find creative ways to fill that time. In modern times now if you're bored you can click on any news site and there will be numerous new negative article you can obsess about. And your view of the world suggests that not only can you do this, but you should do this as a civic responsibility. Just look at the NYTimes right now. On their front page:
- That Beloved Hospital? It's driving Up Health Care Costs
- My Parents Broke The Rules of the Church Out Of Love
- No One Threatens the Environment Like Donald Trump
- No, Your Kid Shouldn't Get a Gold Star for Reading
- Dogs Will Fix Our Broken Democracy
You'd think this was some cherry picked selection over an extended period of time. No, those are all literally on the front...
I think it's still a sign of being sheltered one needs to learn about bad things happening to them on the news.
People who are actually affected (as opposed to sheltered), e.g. latino immigrants under Trump, learn about bad shit in real life and/or have relationships with their community where such things are communicated much faster than they hit the media.
Even if someone in the community stop following all media, they will still learn whatever's important. It's the fully isolated and sheltered people who only learn about things from media coverage.
>There's people dying in Yemen from a war that the US is supporting. There are serious debates occurring about the future of the economy which will have massive repercussions. Climate change poses a threat to the stability of civilization. We're coming to a crossroads with government surveillance issues.
Those things are a 10,000 ft view of the news, and everybody that's even partially in society will know about them. You don't need to follow news and social media to know about them and do something about them.
In fact you can directly join an organization about each of them or a party that does what you think is best on all of those, and push it further to your ideas. You don't need to follow what passes as news for that.
In fact if you watch the mainstream news, you'll get a skewed view of all of those issues, with left and right either agreeing (e.g. in warmongering), or playing disagreement theater (e.g. in climate change, the right wants nothing do, the left wants "green new deal", that is to make money off of the climate, with nothing done. The something that needs to be done, of course, being beyond the pale to discuss: slowing down the economy, cutting down on consumption, and so on).
I read local news from the local paper on local issues, because I'd rather be informed about what happens in my city than the gritty details of the constant horrors that I am personally powerless to affect on the other side of the world.
How do I stop Exxon? How do I stop Raytheon? I already vote straight D. But reading local news taught me about how some of my neighbors are actively helping people in crisis in one of the wealthiest cities on earth. It taught me about how my community leaders are combating climate change. It also taught me how I could get involved in driving local change.
Local news presents issues that I actually have agency to affect. There are pressing issues all over the world at once, so why not focus on the issues in your back yard?
If someone's mental health is impaired by exposure to the news, a period of detox is necessary. Consuming more of it won't help them or the rest of the world while they're in that state, and indeed will likely do more harm by perpetuating the cycle.
A person in such a state would be far better off taking some time to improve their ability to discern between useful news and trash, and to become more able to use their knowledge of the news to inspire positive action.
Nobody has the emotional capacity to handle the anger of every cause from every person they’ve ever met. I saw one meme come through claiming that choosing to stay out of politics was a sign of “privilege” but immediately realized that it’s the exact opposite. Until this new world we lived in happened, every person I’ve ever met didn’t have the ability to broadcast their politics to me unless I saw them in person...and we chose to talk about it one on one like civilized adults.
Following these story lines inspires a lot more hope and respect for my community than any national headline that probably won't affect my life at all.
That's because you were not getting news. You were getting social media. It amazes me that comments here don't distinguish between these. Facebook, twitter, google news, hackernews etc. are not news. They may all use or perhaps disseminate "news" but they are not sources of news.
The partisan politics, the faux outrage, the hyped up drama, it’s what drives clicks and ad $ and it’s awful for our mental health.
Information is wrong, irrelevant, intentionally aggrevating, or all of the above. Sometimes more so, sometimes less, but very nearly always.
I'd started buring out on a noncommercial radio news habit by the late 2010s. Yes, that corresponded with an increased use of social media -- mostly Google+ and Reddit, and not Facebook or Twitter. My social life was entirely offline, I've long had the view that the Internet is for acquiring and discussing information, but not personal details.
I began reading more books and articles. And finding that what was revealed through those was that much of what is encountered through news, journalism, and broadcast ... just misses massive amounts of relevant information. You spend so much time caught up in the malinformed focus on the present that you lose any sense of connection with earlier periods and thought, much of which informs the now.
And the notion isn't new, it's an age-old criticism of the press. Neil Postman wrote of this in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1987) (https://www.worldcat.org/title/amusing-ourselves-to-death/oc...). I.F. Stone and George Seldes both made a life's work of this, from the 1920s through the 1980s. There's an excellent Stone interview online: https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g
And a trailer for "Tell the Truth and Run", about George Seldes: https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=xBJ7hDVvAI0
The book Commercialism and Journalism details the problem. In 1909. It's one of those great "things really haven't changed all that much" insights: https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holt
There are exceptions; there always are. But they are the exception, and the bulk of news really isn't worth bothering about. The stuff that is worth bothering about ... generally doesn't make the news.
It's hard to miss the larger stories -- they intrude into discussions and conversations. If that story is something I perceive as not useful to know or engage with I'll state as much. This includes most crime and political stories, to the extent those focus on crisis de jour, immediate and personal impacts, horse race, or some orange running its mouth off.
I'm more interested in deeper undercurrents. My guiding question over the past seven or eight years has been "what are the Big Problems". And information that doesn't address this isn't particularly interesting.
Specific major stories are. I've been following hurricane Dorian, for example, though my entry point to that wasn't news, but the https://earth.nullschool.org weather visualiser, which shows interesting phenomena. And Dorian showed up initially as a minor swirl just off the coast of Venezuela, then developed rapidly. Then it started turning up in news mentions.
I occasionally catch On the Media's weekly deep-dive into major stories of the week, or longer. That's about the right frequency for me to catch up on news, and it's no longer every week.
Mostly I'm looking at larger themes and patterns that repeat through history. Models, frames, context. Philosophy, history, systems theory, cybernetics.
Focusing exclusively on the new and now takes away from that.
I don't care that I'm out of the loop on a lot of the national soap opera. The loop is pretty dumb usually and not worth wasting much time on. I loooove reading about local transit projects, housing development, and other local matters on the other hand. That stuff I actually use in my life.
I also only use RSS for content, which really saves me time.
I think a lot of people could stand taking a step back from the national drama and studying local issues more closely.
I think it's also nice to have your words weighed against themselves rather than against your reputation. When well regarded people are inclined to agree with you because of that, rather than the quality of your words. When a pariah, vice versa. It's also interesting to give misleading hints to ones identity and see how, if at all, that affects response. For instance this account is named rjf72. I expect nearly everybody that noticed that would then assume my first initials are RJF and my birthday is 1972. It's actually just a neutral reference to Robert James Fischer 1972 - the year Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky to become world champ. Granted I suppose that outs me as enjoying the great game, though. That part is true.
Want to be safe? Sit quietly and say only socially approved things.
It is frustrating to see these issues blamed on "smartphones" at large and not particular usages (Instagram, Tinder, Twitter stand out). I suspect if everyone used their smartphones to read e-books, lookup recipes, text their friends and family, or even just play video games there wouldn't be such a problem.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/201183/forecast-of-smart...
I'm certain such arguments were probably made at the advent of radio, television, and other mass media. 'But this time its different!' No, really. The big difference now is that, even as an adult, I could browse YouTube for hours without ever getting bored. Television, radio, and all previous forms of entertainment were all much more limited in their dynamics and content, even with a gazillion channels, meaning boredom was inevitable and often sooner rather than later.
Alongside what's mentioned from this article, there is also now evidence of decreasing IQ in developed nations. And yes, that is after controlling for immigration and other obvious potential confounding factors. [1] This started in the mid 90s, just about the time the internet explosion started making boredom quickly become a thing of the past. What we're seeing in modern times: decreasing IQ, decreasing testosterone, decreasing fertility, increasing obesity, increasing depression, increasing anxiety. It's hard not to see a connection between these and the end of boredom.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...
Statements like these reveal so much implicit values/philosophy.
Viewing life - success, output, fulfillment etc - through lenses like this is the issue IMO.
I wonder whether it's just the price of progress, of increasing complexity in human organization? As heartbreaking as it is, could it be any different?
Not if all those 401(k), IRA, and defined benefit pension funds want fat ROIs.
There is something quite humorous about people working hard to earn money to invest, and then those same investments causing them to work even harder to meet their ROIs.
I would not have guessed this, given the size of the average person's 401(k). My guess was much smaller. Not sure if I'm worried or relieved to be wrong about that.
Well...now you have to work harder to make those 8% returns come true. And the savers get screwed too because people (aka government) will opt to pump up the value of equities to make sure the 8% nominal return comes true at the expense of sacrificing the value of the currency.
That is certainly where my financial anxieties lie.
You need to be making way above average in at least 50% of the country to afford those things (yes, many people that can't afford those things still do them, but it will bite them in the ass later).
People like stability. People, on average, have less stability these days.
It's super great for exploitation though. Start companies people! Probably no better time, at least outside the tech industry, workers are cheap.
Having met people on streets, I can tell you not everyone thinks like this. It's mostly the audience of this site who are high achievers and focused individuals, they need some way to gauge meaningfulness of their lives and this is how they chose to do it.
I've one friend who only plants trees and another friend who is always creating RC vehicles and uploading videos of his experiments on YouTube. They are happy.
Under-employment is closer, but still fails to account those that have given up hope entirely or who haven't been employed before (but should be working).
The claim that it's harder to get a job out of university today than it was a decade ago is very dubious.
Getting a job as a barista isn't tough in this economy, but if you have a law degree from a school that isn't from the top 40 your odds of doing any law work are getting much slimmer; I've met several such people stuck in low paying jobs.
In my father's day a cashier could buy a home in a nice neighborhood (like the bay area) and live comfortably; in large portions of the country that same position now pays poverty wages and homelessness is a constant threat. Life's pretty miserable if you're constantly worried about having a roof over your head or enough food to eat.
> if you have a law degree from a school that isn't from the top 40 your odds of doing any law work are getting much slimmer.
You need to back up this claim. I don't doubt that that you have met people stuck in low paying jobs. But if you're trying to claim that it'd been getting harder to find well paying jobs while the unemployment rate has hit record lows, you're going to need to back up this claim. I was in college during the recession, and my older classmates that graduated in the early 2010s had a much tougher time than I (graduated mid 2010s) did finding a job.
The observation that this pattern of depression and anxiety has risen at the same time that the economy has improved significantly is a strong indicator that the ability to get a job is not the culprit here.
Saying "I just want to live in a nice neighborhood (like the Bay Area)", is like saying "I just want to drive a decent car (like a Lamborghini)."
The Bay Area is absolutely nothing like the vast majority of America, and should be the absolute last place you'd look if your goal is to live a low-stress middle-class life.
The reality is that the median home in America costs $125 per square foot. I don't know how old your father is, but let's say 1973 as the benchmark. The median home then was 1500 square feet. An equivalent home would cost $187 thousand in today's market.
I don't know about cashier, but the average electrician makes $55,000 per year. More than enough to easily afford the $1000/month mortgage needed for the 1973 home your father bought.
Right now there's a desperate shortage of electricians and anyone with a high school diploma and a work ethic can easily move into that career. Nor are we talking about homes in burned out cities or isolated rural communities. Just check listings for Omaha, NE for example. Omaha has one of the strongest job markets in the US, with the third lowest unemployment rate in the country. Plenty of homes at that price with that size can be found in the center of the Omaha metro.
The typical HN audience is massively distorted when it comes to this. By and large the average HN reader lives in one of America's ultra-high-priced metros like the Bay Area, NYC or DC. The average HN reader isn't anything even remotely approaching a middle-class American life.
They're competing in cut-throat winner-take-all games to obtain ultra-prestigious positions at elite startups, FAANGs or Wall Street firms. I'd strongly suspect that the average HN reader making $100k a year "feels" poor, even though that's the top quartile of Americans. (And much higher than that adjusted for the average age of HN.) My guess is that many HNers making $500k+ a year still don't even "feel rich", despite being in the top 1% of Americans.
The point is that the perception of economic conditions found on HN probably tells us about as much about everyday Americans, as the court of Versaille would tell us about the lives of 18th century French peasants.
[1] https://www.realtor.com/advice/buy/average-price-per-square-... [2] http://www.aei.org/publication/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-s... [3] https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/electrician
Certainly not in STEM. But other college graduates aren't faring that much worse either. So if competition is a stress factor in this, then it can't be explained by market forces.
Is it? I would guess that it's much, much easier than 50 years ago or 100 years ago (it's still hard, obviously). It's open to a much wider range of persons. Denying this is intellectually dishonest.
There's a book, The Coddling of the American Mind, that explains the problem much better than I do.
"First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life."
https://www.thecoddling.com
To support this I would cross-reference screen time between 1st world countries and mental health records, normalizing as best I could for all the other variables in the equation.
"Comparing groups across generations is admittedly difficult, but the data clearly point to things being far worse now. Trend data clearly suggest increases in levels of stress, depression and anxiety at least since the 1980s. Consider that one study found that the average high school student in the year 2000 has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient did in the 1950s; and those rates have only increased in the last decade. Utilizing the MMPI to assess psychopathology, Twenge and colleagues found five times as many students in 2007 surpassed clinical cutoffs in one or more mental health categories, compared with those who took the measure several decades ago."
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/theory-knowledge/2...
For any idea to be meaningful, it should be able to survive challenges. Feelings will betray you. Good and evil are not fundamental universal concepts.
Regardless, I think as a problem it’s more mosaic, that to reduce it to any one cause is too reductive.
Of the (anecdata) pool I'm sampling from, the most anxious / depressed tended to be the most well-off. Personally, coming from the mixed background / lower-middle side, the non-traditional types seemed to fair better, such that I would anecdotally ascribe value to "blue collar suffering" as providing some measure of anti-fragility. But that's far into speculative territory.
In all honesty I'm fairly anxious, but I also can cope or at least mask as necessary. As I've previously expressed, I'm sure it's more a confluence of factors than any one item causing or precluding.
In some ways I think this is due to our ongoing demographic shift. More and more of the US is getting old; old people typically have more assets than young people and need to rely on social security (which young people bear in taxes) and their investments to generate income. I think this is partly contributing to an asset bubble and definitely to the housing shortage (though there are other factors). I don't know if society has ever had a time where more households were not working but still drawing incomes.
But I think you're onto one of the core issues - an a much more personal lens. Many (including myself) compare our successes to that of our parents. They were married by 24. Finished Masters degrees by 26. Bought their first house by 30. I can't compare with that.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/book-review-the-coddl...
https://thebaffler.com/latest/solutionism-for-students-green...
It doesn't sound like you interact with many "kids" these days. As someone surrounded mostly by them, I can assure you none of this is true. Sad to see this upvoted so highly and especially sad to see people pointing out this is a long brought up conservative talking point with no evidence downvoted. I thought we got over this myth 10 years ago. Yet people still want to yell at Mr. Rodgers for caring about child psychology and being on the forefront of mental health in a real way...
Perhaps one should look to the external world these people are coming into for answers. Climate change, the economy, and the political climate with hateful policies against many people over the world in many countries.
Not to mention that mental health being destigmatized raises statistical reporting rates as people are simply more open about it.
But yeah, let's blame bad parenting that people first accused millennials of when no millennials are even left in the post high school college population.
Because none of that stuff existed in the '50s, '60s, and '70s? /s
Just substitute "nuclear war for "climate change".
My wife and I cannot talk about climate change around our kids because they understand how scary it is and we see their fear about the consequences.
Ideally, kids would develop, by trial and error, effective strategies for identifying solvable problems and dealing with them, and not being extremely negatively affected by (directly) unsolvable problems. It would be beneficial for society if people heard about climate change and thought, "Okay, that won't be good, so what are some things I can do in the short term and in the long term to make a positive impact?" The great thing about such an approach is that it's omni-applicable, such as when one's car breaks down on a long drive, etc.
Parents who constantly hover around their kids presumably interfere with this vital process, perhaps because these important lessons can only be discovered, not forcibly taught.
There is no rational evaluation of real dangers and this irrationality is one, if not the most prominent, driving factors for policy. Hell, people are scared because of tweets and mass surveillance is implemented with justifications an occult voodoo mom would get a red face for.
What do you expect to get from police checks in front of schools? And people wonder about school shooters? Seriously?
No, clearly it is smartphones.
Sadly enough, the environmental pressures faced in terms of economic situation and extreme competition have been observed for a very long time in Asian nations, exhibiting themselves in the form of suicides. I hope, deeply so, that the West does not devolve that far...
I did okay-ish (home ownership still seems impossible), but when I see some of my high school and uni friends stuck in bad jobs with seemingly little hope of escape you can understand the despair.
Source: Anecdotal data off of yours truly
For social networks we have this thing called a parasocial relationship. We can what we feel like is a worthwhile relationship online (but it's not). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction#Parasoc...
In the end it screws up our incentive systems by fulfilling our natural urges. We dull our loneliness with the internet in the short term, ending up with greater loneliness in the long term. There's been a lot of reports of loneliness rising rising pretty dramatically. Debt on the other hand is falling as a percentage of gdp: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HDTGPDUSQ163N
IMO internet consumption is in the same category of addictive vice as drugs, gaming/gambling, drinking (which is just drugs tbh), etc. It's a short term simulation of successfully achieving our body's goals. It's fake and interferes with our actual success.
I get the feeling that it's simply because they believe they have leverage over the words people use on their campus, but no leverage over housing expenses or other economic issues that actually have broader appeal.
Remember that neither Gen Z nor Millenials have ever witnessed significant economic change that was brought on by direct action of normal people. Unions have been utterly defanged and left-wing candidates never manage to win or drive change either. Occupy Wall Street was the closest thing we've ever seen to an economic solidarity movement, and that was widely mocked and derided as an utter failure.
While the movement around language policing may give Gen Z the feeling of participating in successful direct action, it unfortunately is contributing to a schism between them and older generations who may be otherwise willing to ally with them on broader causes, but are fearful of mis-stepping and being called out publicly.
Of course, maybe that very same fear of public call-outs ties back to what one of the professors in the article mentioned. The new generation is used to having every little thing they do be potentially subjected to being recorded, publicized, and criticized at any moment through social media. They are constantly self-managing themselves and their social media presence with that in mind. They don't see why older generations shouldn't be held to the same standards - even if they'd rather be exempt from that standard themselves, they accept it as reality.
There's a mockumentary series on netflix called "American Vandal", which besides being funny, was surprisingly insightful about the challenges that young adults are facing in part due to growing up with instagram, twitter, etc. as part of their world. I have a lot more sympathy for them after watching that.
Did you forget about the Great Recession and it’s economic impact? Do you believe it didnt bring significant economic change or is it that it wasn’t brought on by normal people? What exactly defines normal people in this context or better yet, how is that relevant?
It’s confusing to me that despite the soaring costs of housing, the hyper competitive job market ( kids compete not just against other Americans but also students from other countries like India and China, where many of those immigrant kids didn’t have the crushing college debt), the shrinking middle class, and general deregulation that has shifted power to the wealthy - despite all these issues, your view point of what affects these kids is based around social media or more specifically, what standard these kids are held to on social media.
I agree with you on the importance of all those issues. My point is that we have a large number of young people who are disillusioned with both the current economic situation AND lacking confidence in historic tactics (ie, direct action) that the working class used in the past to improve economic situations (ie, joining a union, going on strike, electing leftist officials).
The neo-liberal philosophy that has been sold to Americans for the past few decades teaches people that you are supposed to be able to effect change by choosing with your wallet and advocating by mouth. This too is proving to be ineffectual for meaningful change, but the concept does relate to my greater point: the most powerful currency accessible to this generation is social capital. It accumulates fast and spreads to all corners when it resonates. Social capital is the only reason Trump could become president. It's making and breaking careers (see the rise of "influencers" and streamers), and it's playing out comparitively microscopic level as young people are using modern communication frameworks to define their success in their personal social spheres.
I'm not saying this is a good development. It does distract and divide the working class from one-another. But I see why it happened, and don't think it's apathy or selfishness that has caused this way of thinking to become popular. Either the young generation will reject their hyper-connected "always-on" culture, or the older ones will get on board. Until then it will be hard to work together on bigger issues, and I doubt Gen Z can solve those alone.
There really should also be more discussion about the complexity of the world and decision fatigue, both of which I think are affecting people of all ages but especially younger people.
Secondly, to what worldview are you referring, and what does it not adequately address?
I think, thanks to social media classic socialization among students via social events and clubs has ceased. Person to person interaction isn't a thing anymore, but it's necessary to learn having realistic expectations. Most people crave interaction, comparison, sharing experiences with others, this is normal. With social media it's a two-fold problem: much more people are involved in comparisons (likes, followers), so having little or no followers doesn't help feeling worthy, and the expectation having to have followers at all is unreasonable and unrealistic. The depression is based on doubts that one has any significance in the world, plus, having to keep up with competition. Then there is fear of missing out that drives anxiety like wildfire.
There's pressure from everywhere, even internal. Why wasn't it that big a thing back then? Because personal expectations weren't as bloated then as they are now, and today's young people derive their expectations of themselves (what they think they ought to be, to do) and expectations of others (what they think they can expect from others) from the Internet, forums, social networks mostly, not from personal experience. That is it. Personal physical experience once provided the basis for expectations, people had to learn everything themselves. But now people learn expectations from other peoples' experiences, and not their own. So, today the unrealistic expectations of other people are failing on us, naturally, and we are confronted with the reality of things and people. This is what it feels like leaving one's favorite Twitter filter bubble and learning that the actual world is different and much more complicated.
And I didn't mention the job market yet, because I think it's just a part in the pool of sources of pressure. Anxiety about one's job isn't as new as people think. The awareness is different now, because people share their angst and amplify it via the social media making it even worse. Social media, job situation, pressure are all parts of the same problem - unrealistic expectations from questionable sources.
I just...OMG who the hell are these people. Maybe the economy just stopped getting better for most people after 2008? I mean duh. After a few years when finally becomes obvious that the new normal is gig economy jobs and living under debt until you die, say around 2012-2013, then people's happiness starts to nose dive. That's a much more explanatory answer than "the cell phones did it".
It's like an old person - I thought she was a baby boomer, but she's only 48 - that has a phd (and everything!) is desperately trying to figure out what's going wrong, and they have all the data.
They. Just. Can't. Quite. Get There.
This is the type of person that's running society, maybe that's the problem. Face palm.
Maybe there's a mismatch between wealth and happiness.
Regardless of whatever HN folks think is the cause, therapists and psychiatrists are an actual solution; you should see one.
When did that happen? As someone who has undergone treatment for many years and read a lot of the literature, the long-term success rates for treatment of depression are mediocre, at best.
Some mainstream treatment approaches can be somewhat effective for some people. Maybe they can be completely effective for some people. I'm not going to argue the toss on that.
But there's a significant cohort of people for whom these conditions do not respond well to conventional treatment, at least to the extent of full recovery.
I'm one of those people.
We're talking about at least 19 years of dealing with anxiety, and plenty of depression along the way. Some medications have been moderately effective at abating some of the symptoms, but not at bringing about anything approximating complete recovery and a "normal" life.
What has been effective for me is a long-term program involving a combination of subconscious emotional healing techniques, as well as various physiological healing methods, including:
- detoxification of heavy metals (including lead, mercury, aluminium),
- increasing/balancing levels of critical nutrients (particularly minerals - calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, iron and zinc, as well as iodine, which is critically low in many people with complex health problems, due to its crucial role in thyroid function, and which is insufficient in may people's diets, particularly in western countries),
- addressing chronic infections (e.g., Epstein Barr, Cytomegalovirus, fungal, bacterial and parasitic infections),
- adopting an anti-inflammatory diet, and
- regularly engaging in the right kinds of exercise (stretching and core strength exercises like yoga/pilates), and moderate (definitely not strenuous) cardio exercise like brisk walking.
After about 8 years of that I'm almost fully recovered, I think and desperately hope.
But you won't get recommendations for any of these approaches from a conventional psychologist or psychiatrist, and if you were to ask one about them you'd get laughed out of the clinic.
Thus, many people continue to suffer, even after years of treatment from mainstream practitioners.
It can result in you just getting drugged enough in many cases. It would be interesting to know how these problems manifest in the first place.
Until then I would say your assesment is probably wrong.
What to do? Anecdotally, I can certainly say that lessening exposure to these things really helps. But not everyone has the environment or self control to do such things.
Its full of posts of 'see how great my life is' or 'see how bad the world is'. This combined with a media intergrated into our lives almost real-time whose organisations are all looking to maximise our attention.
We used to go through the world in a much simpler bubble and get our half hours news window on TV or newspaper in the morning. And being connected to the wider journeys of people for more realistic expectations e.g. rather than seeing someone post a picture of a great car saying 'how good is this' you also got to see they had been working and saving hard for a few years.
Ive thought about this a bunch and dont know how we can deal with it better. I cant see social media going away. I tried one of those apps that shows the screen time you spend but it didnt really change habits for me. I mentioned to my partner the other day that we should consider setting on weekend day as a screen free day.
I really think this is somethign important for society to work on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11031-018-9683-...
https://time.com/4358140/overcome-fomo/
For a long time I thought "FOMO" was just a trendy bit of slang that hit the nail on the head nicely, but it's actually a documented psychological phenomenon (though I don't know which came first).
Ever since I learned about it, I've basically trained myself to not check social media often and, when I do, to remind myself that the pieces I see of other people's lives aren't representative of their lives as a whole, nor are they representative of what I should be expecting or enjoying from my own life. It's helped a little.
Another issue is the change in the number of people living here. 1990 had 250MM. 2018 had 327MM. That 30% increase is bound to add stress and conflict.
Another: the pace of change has been overwhelming in the last 25 years. That might create self-doubt about one's capacity to keep skills updated.
Another: the decrease in life expectancy of white middle class people due to overdose and suicide. The plague of suicide is the message of futility and nihilism for survivors to absorb.
Prosperity cures a multitude of ills. Widespread under-employment brings every bruise, boil, laceration, and trauma to the forefront. College students see the employment landscape. They face competition from citizens and non-citizens, and thus a pie that gets divided among a bigger denominator.
The economic reality is that college is necessary for skilled occupations. Parents steer their kids into college, even though some of those kids don't have the self-management skills to succeed in college. If they do have these skills, they commonly are allowed to take coursework that is bound to result in a minimum wage job. This mortgages the first 20 working years of their adult lives with student loan debt service. I would certainly be discouraged by this prospect.
Lastly, the disconnect in authentic relationships that social media fostered took away a piece of the fundamental human safety net.