I was glad to see this article actually mention societal and tech factors that could be behind this rise. It is rare to see the mainstream discuss the upstream factors for ADHD, Depression, Gender Dysphoria, Diabetes, and much more. Especially in kids and teens.
“Kids are now vulnerable to cyberbullying and critical comments, like ‘I hate you’, ‘Nobody likes you,’” he said. “It’s like harpoons to their heart every time.”
From an evolutionary standpoint, I sincerely believe that people aren't mentally equipped to deal with society as presented by the internet/media.
I make my living due to technology, but if there was a big switch to throw that would turn off television/internet I'd do it without hesitation. I think the long term benefits would outweigh the short term chaos.
No I think the internet is unequipped for what we need from it. It runs off ads and shovels enraging content at people. It allows hostile behavior to have no consequences. It’s anonymous except nothing you do is private. There is no dispute resolution, mods have absolute power, and you can’t ever talk to customer support because you aren’t the customer, the advertisers are.
> I make my living due to technology, but if there was a big switch to throw that would turn off television/internet I'd do it without hesitation.
I've had similar thoughts, in similar terms. Put that switch in front of me and I'd toggle it with glee in my heart and a smile on my face.
A couple decades ago I was so optimistic about this stuff. In the big picture, it's done little but disappoint, since then. Same as many a great, grand idea—ruined by contact with economics and human "games".
Even civilization as a whole has not been around nearly long enough for our species to be very well adapted to it. The species we cite as well adapted for civilized life were really adapted for other traits that just happenstance were relevant in an urban environment; like a pigeon's propensity to nest in a building ledge coming from its propensity to nest on a rocky cliff, or how if you kill off all bad for human predators like wolves, you'd be left with urban coyotes to fill the niche and this doesn't mean anything really about the coyote vs the wolf's ability to survive in the city (independent of humans killing them of course).
Of course we are all suffering from mental illness and poor physical health and this that and the other thing all the time. All we do is stress out about what others think about ourselves and sit around lethargic. We didn't spend millions of years of mutation and selection to be the most optimal couch potato. We spent it to be a master forager of the environment, setting out on foot by morning for resources when the weather and light is good, and spending the day and evening in engineering or creative pursuits. I'm convinced even language had a role to play in changing our behavior dramatically in this way, since often what we do in life is limited to what we are able to communicate with words or thoughts in our language with its finite set of descriptors.
Behavior, including anything bullying-like, seems much more heavily policed among younger kids than ever (nobody thought a thing of the odd "I'll kill you!" or "I hate you!" in elementary school in the 80s or 90s, and I'm told we were far more "coddled" then than in the 70s or earlier—now, even a one-off of that kind of thing gets a call to parents) but much nastier stuff is more prevalent than ever in middle school and up, thanks to social media and smartphones (the Internet being everywhere, all the time, is what made social media take off in the mainstream, and why it's so heavily used).
Even just 15 years ago it was a totally different beast online. Future politicians are lucky no one was recording their banter in the halo 3 lobby. You were expected to be thick skinned and not take anything seriously. Maybe it helped that an fps actually gave you a way to dish it back though if you had the skill to back up your talk. It seemed like after halo 3, no one bothered turning on a mic and that culture was over before long.
Maybe it's time to shine some light on inequality in the realm of attractiveness???
As kids increasingly interact via social media, being funny, intelligent, or creative is less important than looking good in pictures. I can't imagine how shitty this is for teenagers. We used to lament the "unattainable beauty standards" of magazines and on TV, but this seems even more harmful.
I dunno how you do this though, as even just admitting something like: "I am handicapped in the looks department" is pretty depressing. At the same time it seems messed up that someone who is attractive doesn't just get preferential treatment in their daily interactions, but can now monetize their looks easily via social media (or onlyfans lol).
Perhaps the issue is that whatever you're good at, you'll be shown along side the best of the best. Your friend's joke is funny when you hear it at a party. But is it as funny on Twitter, where it's shown alongside jokes from professional comedians?
Not to mention that the audience is very different between friends at a party and on Twitter. Twitter, and social media, is far more reaching and lots of context and intent may be lost as we cross many different cultural lines and play the game of telephone. Your friends are far more likely to be good faith actors, but even there we can see how a singular bad actor can quickly ruin a situation. I'd argue that there's parallels to not just jokes but any types of communication (science, tech, political, etc) and attraction. (Though people are also able to successfully carve out bubbles and find a very specific audience but at the same time very large. Both can be true. Sometimes the hate can amplify these bubbles. Not so simple)
Absolutely has been. Loads of YouTube channels where the creator has a thick accent, looks unremarkable but builds an audience through persistence and/or passion.
There are comedic social media creators that look plain but build a style and crowd as a result.
> "I am handicapped in the looks department" is pretty depressing.
Conversely (and as you hinted at), "I'm only liked for my looks," illustrates the double-bind at play. Yes, it's difficult to shift societal norms but I encourage folks to ask themselves, "Which other norms shifted in the last hundred years?" and how that was accomplished.
At least in the Western developed world, discrimination against less attractive people is probably the most potent, most prevalent and least acknowledged discrimination in the society.
It is most potent because this happens at almost every human interaction from trivial (getting help at a store from the staff) to important (selecting a husband or a wife).
It is most prevalent because this happens across all races, religions and sexes without any inhibition. Other than the old adage, "don't judge book by its cover." people judge others based on looks all the time and feel justified in doing so. There's not even a word like racism, sexism, anti-X or X-phobia for discrimination against less attractive people.
It is least acknowledged because as you mentioned, there's no one who would like to join the "ugly" identity group. There's no commonly shared root like race, religion, sex, or ethnicity. And identifying oneself as "ugly" probably hurts the person more than it can help.
It is unfortunate that there's no foreseeable solution to this wide spread problem at all, other than voluntary empathy from the society in general. But at the same time, that may be the most important antidote to any discrimination we face rather than top-down rule of law change.
Not gonna lie. That hasn't occurred to me, but that is a pretty grave discrimination as well.
It might be even more insidious because there's a strong justification that stupid people are stupid because of their own volition. However, in reality, there's element of intelligence that's purely genetic and there's nothing a person can do.
As with all things in life, a determinist can spin it so it's no fault of the individual. Someone might have little control over their beauty or their intelligence, or even if they are a jerk, or even if they are violent and abusive.
The reason I bring it up is because I think there is an important distinction between a illogical bias and a simple preference.
People are very preoccupied with weeding out bad biases, and often mistake preferences for them. Things are only complicated more when egalitarian ideas get mixed in.
There's nothing inherently wrong about wanting a beautiful life partner or to watch an attractive Entertainer. Those are legitimate preferences. The only problem is when individuals place that as a higher priority than something else that they actually want more.
> what about discrimination against stupid people?
It is also very common, but also very frequently is discrimination that goes to the core of the overt purpose of the decision being made. As discrimination is simply having any factor play into a decision, the usual problem is with (1) decisions whose motivation is to cause harm to a group, or (2) decisions in which factors like membership in a group are weighed that are not germane to the overt non-malicious purpose, which cause an (unwarranted by the purpose) adverse impact on the group.
> At least in the Western developed world, discrimination against less attractive people is probably the most potent, most prevalent and least acknowledged discrimination in the society.
It’s prevalent and potent, but it is extremely widely acknowledged. The degree to which it is seen as problematic is more variable ("discrimination", in and of itself, is simply having a factor influence a decision, and is not universally viewed as problematic.)
> There’s not even a word like racism, sexism, anti-X or X-phobia for discrimination against less attractive people.
Yes, there is, and the word is “lookism”. [0]
> It is least acknowledged because as you mentioned, there’s no one who would like to join the “ugly” identity group.
“Ugly” isn’t an identity group. Discrimination can happen on literally any basis (every basis on which a decision is made is “discrimination”), not only by identity groups.
Isn’t depression period at an all time high? When ever depression is explored or written about it’s always in the context of females and not males. At least from what I see. Everyone knows boys and men have a really hard time with mental health but nothing is really done about it. Man up as they say. I wish the conversation was evenly distributed.
Yes the article mentioned boys a few times but doesn't go into any depth. And its not so much this article its really the overall quantity of these types of articles that focus on female over male. Of course an article can focus on one or the other and that is fine but I find it just tends to be lopsided towards females.
I can't find major newspaper articles specifically focused on suicide among teenage boys, even though the rate of it is 400% higher than for teenage girls, and getting worse faster.
Yes, males have done about 80% of the teen suicides since basically always.
I can remember a handful of articles about boys struggling over the years but like your Yang example they have been on the opinion page and tainted with the whiff of "men's rights" grievances.
They talk about the boys... at least enough to say the girls have twice the rate of depression, that the boys' depression can manifest as aggression, and that these teen boys are victimizing the girls sexually.
It's from surveys, as far as I can tell, so attempts to compare results with anything except same results for previous years for the same sub-group needs a giant asterisk next to it (and even comparing across years is iffy, depending on what conclusions you're trying to draw).
Twice the rate of self-reported, when asked persistent sadness, as boys' also self-reported rate, then.
Hell, the article even kinda covers this, noting that boys' depression may not be experienced as persistent sadness. And that's before we consider biases in tendency to report such things to begin with, which may (to put it lightly) differ between the sexes.
(Nb. it may well in-fact be true that girls are experiencing depression at double the rate of boys—but a survey's not enough to determine that)
On another topic:
> On a handful of topics, the survey results suggested teenagers were doing better than in previous years. They reported lower rates of illicit drug use and bullying at school, for example. And teenagers are having less sex, with fewer sexual partners, than in previous years.
I mean... the jokes write themselves. "No wonder they're all sad!"
The conversation has definitely evolved to push back on it but in any practical sense its still "be a man". I feel that is the general expectation of males.
Everything seems to be getting worse. I get surprised when the media mentions anything developing in a positive direction. And it’s not about “the media” since that’s been a source of negativity forever. I mean, these last few years everything seems to be getting worse, and media bias doesn’t even factor much into it.
"long-brewing national tragedy only made worse by the isolation and stress of the pandemic"
As a parent, it seems strange to me to blame this situation on the pandemic when it's been, for all purposes, over in most parts of the country for more than a year. My kids have been back in school, sports, and being IRL with their friends for going on two years now.
The inability of mental health professionals to clearly separate temporary factors like pandemic isolation from the pervasive root causes that remain unaddressed is pretty frustrating. The science, if you can even call it that, is distressingly thin here and it makes me angry.
it was a huge hit to the gut. the kids were sitting at home for like a year+. crappy zoom non-classes where everyone falls asleep. at my local high school even the newly built sports field was shut down and fenced off for the whole year. why??? sure, the pandemic, whatever, but it was brutal for the little people.
It didn't have to be that way. I moved my family out of California in May 2020 to get away from the terrible decisions that were already happening. They were playing sports and doing normal stuff by June, 2020. Went to school in person that fall.
All of the data was there. It's been there the whole time.
The pandemic (isolation etc) might have formative/lasting effects though, similar to trauma? Perhaps especially for kids/youth who were a certain age/stage of growing up at the time?
Well, it is red meat thrown to the activists to avoid talking about issues that would make them shout down the article and its publisher.
For example, if we talk about racial issues in this country,
we don’t usually focus on the capitalist music industry using gangsta rap to export role models spewing misogynistic lyrics to Black kids many of whom identify with them, we don’t talk much about the breakdown in the nuclear family, the rise of divorces or out-of-wedlock births. (People used to — see the Moynihan report for instance.) We hardly talk about welfare traps or minimum wage laws (Milton Friedman used to etc.) We don’t talk about academic performance of Black kids being affected by stuff like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_white
Whenever Bill Cosby or Stephen A Smith or Deloris Tucker someone like that goes on a rant, they are shouted down.
That is why it is far safer to attribute it all to slavery 150 years ago, and Jim Crow laws, even though the previous generations who had marriage and school uniforms and higher church attendance etc. are horrified at what many in the current generations have been doing, and the lyrics in Drill music or Gangsta Rap etc. People are starting to wake up — I have been in a clubhouse room with 2000 people about whether a lot of rap is leading to violence, and almost everyone on stage was Black and most were saying absolutely. Some people said it creates jobs in the music industry, others pointed out how many jobs are destroyed overall because the kids can’t pass an interview. And so on. It was really nice to see but only possible because Black people got together to honestly discuss what has been going on. Now we need to turn it into action, in our own lives, with our own kids, and what they are exposed to. Most parents work so much or are divorced and the kids are raised by the street or by the government!
There's also the fact that things are getting worse in terms of the reproductive rights among females. If you are a teen girl growing up in a red state where you have the national culture celebrating how we have supposedly advanced past bigotry and hate, while you have your local state legislature making it impossible to get an abortion and general being cruel and corrupt, its hard not to get depressed about the situation.
This rise also seems present in e.g. The Netherlands; ~24% of women aged 12 to 25 in 2021; up from ~14% in 2020.[1] It's less than "3 in 5" from this article, but the age brackets are different and differences in the asked questions might influence things, so it can't be directly compared.
I think we're supposed to stop looking to Cosby for moral advice? Anyway, complicating an already contentious issue (parent stipulates that he is "angry") with one's own idiosyncratic take on "race in America" seems bad for reasoned discussion.
Who do you look to for moral advice? What is wrong with Deloris Tucker and Steven A Smith?
And anyway, one does not need to be a paragon of virtue in every fact of their life to denounce current trends. Many people who were very loud turned out to do shady things in the background. Are we supposed to look to BLM leaders for advice, for example? NAACP has a far longer track record and their leaders seem to have acted with more integrity over the decades: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-lives-matter-activ...
Normally I wouldn't respond in a thread I had already declared OT, but you've asked a fairly direct question.
Smith is a windbag who riles up viewers about controversial trivia. He is less obnoxious than most such, since his topics typically relate to sports rather than politics, but nothing he has said outside the realm of sports (and fairly little he has said within it) would indicate a habit of deep thought. Tucker passed away 17 years ago, and in the preceding decade seems primarily to have been a one-note instrument. Cosby's infamy perhaps doesn't disqualify him as a source of advice, but it makes one wonder. What common thread weaves through these three seemingly different exemplars you've chosen?
I prefer to think in terms of ethics rather than morality, and in terms of timeless values rather than current events. I struggle with this, but I feel I have benefited from the works of Walter Kaufmann, Kierkegaard, and other existentialist and existentialist-adjacent thinkers. If you seek moral advice and can't find it in your bible or at church, perhaps you might appreciate e.g. Jason Whitlock? I do, but in a different way than most of his other fans, I suspect.
I suppose the common thread is that they are all outspoken Black people, from different walks of life, who have all recognized that corrosive influences are coming from certain capitalist entertainment industries and contributing to cultural/moral degradation as a negative externality made in the name of profit.
Cosby spent YEARS playing "America's dad" for the Black family, as did James Avery, Reginald VelJohnson and others. They provided a wholesome role model to look up to, of a married family man, who provides for his kids and teaches them manners and morals, as opposed to "role models" poppin bottles and bangin models that the rap industry provides. Misogynistic lyrics, racial slurs, materialistic lifestyles, sometimes even glorifying violence. What good does it do? If outsiders can't criticize it because it is "authentic Black expression", then it falls to Black voices to do so. And they do, increasingly.
To try to combat moral / cultural degradation and restore family values takes both economic and cultural reform.
I mean, I think you're tilting at windmills here when you're going after everyone's moral character who has said similar things. I could give you a lot more examples, but they haven't and don't make a dent in the capitalist machine. It has adapted.
The reason it's on topic is because it's just a special case of what that machine sells to everyone regardless of consequences. Instagram and TikTok "influencers" have contributed massively to anxiety and depression of teenage girls, but also promote dressing and acting in ways their parents and grandparents never could.
Miley Cyrus was the "voice of a generation", a "good girl" promoted by "wholesome" Disney, then she had a coming-out with the record industry, where her biggest new talent was sticking her tongue out while naked and gripping a chain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My2FRPA3Gf8
Again, there doesn't need to be a conspiracy behind it (as Kanye believes) it's just what the market (and "the algorithm") selects for.
Look at your news, it's all become click-bait that makes ADULTS (whose brains are fully developed) into frothing-at-the-mouth rabid haters of the left, or the right, or whoever. It also radicalizes citizens into supporting destructive wars.
Look at your social media. It has made you distracted at dinner, addicted like a pav...
Again, there doesn't need to be a conspiracy behind it (as Kanye believes) it's just what the market (and "the algorithm") selects for.
As C. Wright Mills wrote in The Power Elite, "To accept either view -- of all history as conspiracy or all history as drift -- is to relax the effort to understand the facts of power and the ways of the powerful." The precise form of our situation is not inevitable. Just as algorithms are written by people, so are laws and extortion notes. The tools that oppress us may be refashioned into others that free us. We must keep in mind that tools are nothing in themselves; they take on significance when used.
I do agree "that machine sells to everyone". Perhaps it makes sense to compare the situation of teen girls to that of black families like you suggest, since there is a sizable overlap between these groups. Rather than despairing of all the awful media, however, would it be better to focus on better media? The Cosby Show was produced in the 1980s, but surely there are good things happening now? Not necessarily shows on television, which is itself the sort of machine we're discussing. I've heard good things about "Black Twitter"...
Conservatism seems reasonable in the face of the issues you identify, but it's not, especially if you're following Milton Friedman on the minimum wage as you indicate above. The real minimum wage right now is barely half of the inflation-adjusted $12 it was in 1968. Had it kept pace with productivity as well as inflation, it would have been $22 by now. [0] Our enemies don't care about ideology. They happily wore the skins of Republicans before they wore the skins of Democrats, and it will be no trouble for them to switch again.
The lockdown did harm teen girls, even if we can't prove it to the scientific satisfaction of thread parent. That's not even the really bad part. What they have done once, they can and will do again. When it is normal for children to plug into a device instead of going to public school, it will be easy for some asshole billionaires to arrange that the children will just plug into their "education" apps and all the money we used to waste on teachers instead can just go to collateral for some asshole billionaire personal lines of credit. After they've done away with teachers, the McKinsey consultants will start examining whether the children really need parents. After all, they don't need a home if they're plugged into their devices...
But seriously, give Whitlock a listen, especially one of the episodes featuring Royce White. They are both better than Steven "A" Smith, in every respect.
Thank you for your recommendations, I will try to make some time for those -- been so busy, as many have!
By the way, I think for myself -- even though I cited Friedman, I disagree with him in various ways, after looking at the data. I am not a fiscal conservative, but I am a social conservative. I think corporations have co-opted liberal movements like women's lib, and freedom of speech, and conflated them with corporate agendas, e.g. turning feminism into "Lean In" climbing the corporate ladder for women. Freedom of speech actually suffers under capitalism, because the one who pays the piper calls the tune. Those with million of "followers" have social capital, and we should be more concerned about how they got "platformed" than whether they would be "deplatformed". Their profit motive and incentive structure leads them to corrupt society with their controversial, incorrect, corrosive rhetoric which is passed off as "entertainment" the minute it's criticized (Alex Jones' Sandy Hook bullshit comes to mind, as does FOX election conspiracies, which falls apart the minute they are sued). It corrupts society at large. That's why I started https://rational.app
In fact, I think that safety nets and UBI and 30-hour overtime laws will help men and women opt out of the rat race, and spend more time with their kids. The increased health, IQ points and better morals / education of the children will actually provide greater monetary returns for society (even though for me they are ends in themselves). For example, the moratorium on evictions may have enabled a richer society than one where millions of people are housing-insecure.
I think that UBI and gift economies (like science, open source and wikipedia) are far healthier than "private ownership" of social capital like audiences, (Twitter followers), distribution (news stations, etc.) or infrastructure. Gift economies become possible when people have their maslow's needs met and the anxiety is gone, so they can freely associate with projects they like, instead of being mercenaries 40-60 hours a week to survive. In these gift economies, there are so many small contributions that peer review is instituted (in science, open source, wikipedia, etc.) which actually increases the quality of what is published far better than competition, because most audience members are not informed enough (and will soon be bamboozled by AI bots and fake articles on a scale heretofore unseen, in the current capitalist system).
That's why I believe in building decentralized solutions, like solar panels, mesh networks, open source social networks, and smart contracts. I want a world where people are healthier, safer, and more moral. Sadly, the corporations and governments collude to keep the individuals distracted and at each other's throats (glance at https://magarshak.com/blog)
I am more interested in widespread problems in society than one specific person. But having said that, regarding Cosby raping women, I can only go by what I read about the Cosby allegations and lawsuits on Wikipedia.
There is a lot said on both sides (eg several women sued Cosby for calling them liars in 2014). It seems the biggest actual clear admission of sexual assault was from a leaked deposition where he described how he would give Quaaludes in the 60s and 70s to women he met in clubs and subsequently slept with. I looked up the drug on Wikipedia:
Methaqualone became increasingly popular as a recreational drug and club drug in the late 1960s and 1970s, known variously as "ludes" or "disco biscuits"[citation needed] due to its widespread use during the popularity of disco in the 1970s, or "sopers" (also "soaps") in the United States and Canada, and "mandrakes" and "mandies" in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. The substance was sold both as a free base and as a salt (hydrochloride). This use means the drug is controlled in most countries, and is so under Schedule II of the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances.
So if this drug was “in widespread recreational use” in that period, I would imagine this was a widespread systemic problem, and not just limited to Cosby.
So once again, we as a society are distracted and made to think one specific guy is the problem, where actually the entire liberal society got permeated with this kind of stuff, fueled by the exact sort of profit seeking industry I am talking about: drug sales, in this case, rather than rap songs. I am not saying for the government to get involved and carry on a violent and useless drug war on the supply. I am talking about demand-side education like the “just say no to Drugs” by Nancy Reagan, but more importantly — individual attention and relationships with kids, teenagers and young adults, by their parents, teachers, coaches, clergy, whoever. Don’t let the kids slip through the cracks and become loners / outcasts. That is how they turn to these drugs and then this gets cynically exported by CAPITALIST MEDIA to all the others. I am not being hyperbolic, look:
Even today, how many times do we investigate allegations of rape on campus, and enact yes means yes and affirmative opt in policies, while doing precious little about the upstream culture of ALCOHOL FUELED PARTIES on campus? These teenagers are below legal drinking age — but besides that, the very idea that college is like an expensive year cruise for partying and experimentation, and coming of age, is behind many of the activities. The “girls gone wild” and “spring break” videos exploit this at the extremes, but we KNOW about the parties even today, yet we focus downstream only, and catch isolated cases.
Hookup culture and casual dating has replaced “going steady”, engagement and marriage. Out of wedlock births have skyrocketed. Divorce rates and opiates and antidepressants have skyrocketed. You can listen to any person, doesn’t have to be Cosby. But what Cosby has admitted to was widespread in society (drug use, alcohol etc) so shouldn’t we as a society look at the widespread problem, instead of patting ourselves on the back that we removed “all the rapists” from the pool?
It is like the gun debate … there are lots of guns in the country, most of the time the people shot and the people doing the shooting are drunk, but we as a society are hung up on individual cases after the fact or “a good guy with a gun an stop a bad guy with a gun”. We don’t connect the dots. The NHS was ordered to STOP doing research into guns and alcohol as an epidemiological or health issue.
This is based on data from 2021. Since even then, there have been several significant regressions for women and LGBT rights, most notably the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Women of the next generation are growing up in the difficult position where they have less rights and bodily autonomy than their grandmothers grew up with.
The data in that survey comes from the American Family Survey, which seems to be taken pretty seriously, but the commentary is from the Institute for Family Studies, which is taken... less seriously. Caveat lector. Maybe the underlying data supports the point you (and IFS, for its own reasons) are making, but it's worth digging in, I guess.
One supposes it's easier to be happy as a conservative woman in 2022 given that identifying as such likely means you're sanguine about Roe --- which is a point even the IFS article makes.
I don't think IFS is any less objective than social science academia, which is dominated by people who take "rights" and "autonomy" as essential ends in themselves. Indeed, I'm not sure it's even possible to be objective in this space. The underlying phenomenal are complex and multi-faceted, while the broader principles are quasi religious in nature. That said, the underlying survey is from Yougov/Deseret, and it says what it says.
Also, it's not an isolated finding. The finding that conservatives are happier is consistently replicated (and long before 2022).
Deseret News is a wholly owned subsidiary of the LDS church. BYU is part of the Church Education System, which is part of the LDS church, and the president of the church directly controls BYU via his chairmanship of the BYU board.
Yougov is a surveys for hire company.
So, yeah, it’s a survey run by the Mormon church.
But, more importantly, the conclusions drawn from it by IFS are simply not academically rigorous.
If you look again, you'll notice that I didn't incorporate any social science academia into my point. I'm not violently allergic to that research, but it's not something I keep tabs on, so you can usually assume I'm not trying to take down an argument you're making with "The University of California, Berkeley Center For Comparative Family Welfare says...".
Unlike the sibling comment here, I'm not trying to disqualify the underlying survey, just to point out that it's framing in the article you cited is heavily motivated; countervailing results or analysis presumably would not be allowed to run on the IFS website.
> Unlike the sibling comment here, I'm not trying to disqualify the underlying survey, just to point out that it's framing in the article you cited is heavily motivated; countervailing results or analysis presumably would not be allowed to run on the IFS website
IFS is "heavily motivated" compared to who exactly? Would New America or whoever NPR and the NYT turn to for analysis ever run with a similar story? The notion that increased autonomy and reduced social restriction is an unalloyed good is almost axiomatic among the folks who run every mainstream intellectual institution that isn't expressly conservative. It's the closest a lot of these folks have to a religion. They're highly motivated not to publish contrary evidence.
I mean: IFS is much, much more motivated than NYT is, but if your point is that NYT is not, on its own, entirely trustworthy about subjective evaluations of research: sure. That's true. But: I didn't cite the NYT.
For what it's worth, most of my conservative friends would strongly disagree with you about the importance of individual autonomy!
> Lots of research shows that the happiest people in the country are conservative women
If you are a woman in a country that is increasingly oppressing women, it seems it goes without saying that the women most at peace with that state of affairs are the women supportive of that oppression. I'm sure this is as true of the USA as it is of Iran.
That's a good question that probably doesn't have a single good answer. Conservative Muslim women have strongly opposed feminist movements in Iran and elsewhere. Pro-monarchy peasants have often killed proponents of democracy throughout history. Some have a reactionary impulse to oppose progress even if it is in their self interest.
What if they disagree that it is in their interest? Is there any objective way to say whether something is in someone’s interest? Consider the Amish, for example: they disagree that adopting all modern technology is in their interest. Should we force our opinion upon them? If not, should we force it on conservative women?
It would seem to me that a conservative could live how ever conservatively they want, even if others think it oppressive. A Southern Baptist has as much access to dance freely but may chose not to do so; just because they don't believe dancing is okay and can refuse to partake, it doesn't mean there should be laws to prevent it for everyone. Why should anyone be allowed to oppress those that do not wish to be repressed, simply because they themselves prefer it?
[edit to add] One can be conservative in a liberal environment, but to be liberal in a conservative place such as Iran has dire consequences. The only people being imposed on are the ones not free to live to their choosing, so there is no equivalent to forcing upon a conservative in the way conservative laws force upon non-conservatives (that I am aware of)
Well that's not really a full picture if you take into account that we live in a society... Everyone's actions have externalities, living in a liberal culture is a very different experience for a conservative than for that same person living in a conservative culture, their communities will be very different and affected by the larger culture, etc etc etc. Yours is a very liberal/individualistic point of view. Which is fine but there are plenty of other points of view.
That's the social liberal version of the "rational economic person” fallacy. It assumes that people know what will make them happy, and that people--especially young people with developing brains--can work toward those ends without education and social reinforcement.
In reality, most people don't know what choices will make them happy. How could they? And even if they did, they wouldn't know how to get from Point A to Point B, or have the willpower and discipline to stick to it. They need society to develop generational knowledge about those things, socialize children and young people to understand that learning, and socially reinforce good choices. And frankly liberals know that because in other respects, they support societal intervention to protect people from bad choices and help them make good ones. They just have this huge blind spot. The act like the young adult who needs society to protect them from predatory lenders doesn’t need protection from people who might exploit them in other ways. Or that the person who needs education and social pressure when it comes to sugary soft drinks doesn’t need it when it comes to far more impactful decisions about how to live.
And that's before we get to externalities. That's another concept liberals understand but pretend has no application to social norms and behaviors. As if divorce or drug use only affect the individual and not people around them.
Quite the condescending view there. I invite you to consider that our society and our women are aware and educated enough not to fall for rosy words like "progress" to actually mean true progress, and to us it is actually a regression, so it doesn't really interest us.
The study you linked to about conservative women seems to totally ignore the fact that there are confounding factors. To pick just one, conservatives are about half as likely to make under $30k/year compared to liberals:https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-stu...
Additionally, lots of things have been happening in the last 30 years. The erosion of reproductive rights has been a slow process happening since right after Roe. Income inequality has been rising. Etc.
Party affiliation isn’t a good proxy for “liberal” versus “conservative” in this context. A lot of women who vote democrat are fairly socially conservative but vote democrat for other reasons. Only 58% of democrats, for example, say that “changing gender roles” has made it “easier” for “women to lead satisfying lives.” https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/10/18/wide-pa...
If you look at another proxy for privilege, education, the trend runs in the opposite direction. Only 31% of women with only a high school education say feminism has helped them, versus 55% of those with a college education: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/07/07/a-centu...
The alternative read of the data, which I suspect is more accurate, is that increased rights and autonomy disproportionately benefits high status women (e.g. pursuing interesting careers, etc). Lower status women, meanwhile, disproportionately suffer the burdens (decreased pressure for men to make commitments and support families).
Yougov’s standard liberal/conservative axis question (something along the lines of do you identify as strongly liberal/liberal/center/conservative/strongly conservative) maps pretty well to party affiliation.
Pew surveys are much more sophisticated and do differentiate between some of those finer points that you mentioned.
It depends. Happiness is about wanting what you get, and oppression is about denying someone their wants. Obviously people often have different wants, otherwise there would be no such thing as politics. So rights and autonomy can make some people happy if it brings them what they want, and vice versa.
Also, conservative women being happy is not surprising. This is because happiness breeds conservatism. Why? Because you're happy, and you want to keep that status quo. If you were unhappy, you'd want to change things to what you're happy with. People may overlook this, because they typically use the terms conservative and liberal as historical egos, rather than their root meanings.
Unless you're told the status quo is what you're postulated to be happy with and unhappiness is due to something else, e.g. appointed enemy, so you must double down on the postulate and destroy the enemy.
In which case, you're unhappy, and seek change to what you think would bring you happiness (eg removing the enemy). Whether achieving this bring you happiness or not, is a separate matter, as happiness is about wanting what you get, not getting what you (think you) want.
The leaders of some local governments in recent years are especially cruel terrible people. Imagine if your representative was Matt Gaetz with sex trafficking allegations and trying to feel good about the direction your state is headed. Imagine if your neighbors were throwing his campaign signs in their lawn; is this a community you want to be a part of long term? Do they even value women such as yourself?
unpopular opinion here; there has been over 30M abortions in the united states since 1973. Whether you believe in life before death or not, that leaves 30M people who never got the chance at life. The thought of 'what if' haunts some women, despite what the media says.
You can blame technology to a degree, but even then technology probably just serves to amplify existing negative trends. Kids today are far more likely than in the past to move around and have divorced parents. They’re less likely to live in inter-generational households. They’re less likely to have a job or go to church or interact with society at large in meaningful ways.
Meanwhile what fills that vacuum of civil society is other children, through age-segregated schooling and, these days, social media. That strikes me as a huge problem, because children are antisocial semi-humans without fully developed brains. Having children spend most of their time around other children, without strong socializing forces, is a perverse arrangement.
Being with mostly the same 20-750 kids (depending on school size) in your grade for most of your growing up seems cruel. You're going to change a lot, but the social dynamics can only evolve so much. The lack of ability to reinvent yourself, to re-find place is starkly different than the rest of the world, where that activity & the newness of other people is perpetual.
I've been so thankful that at my high school there was a great open lunch, & quite a few areas where different school grades mixed together. I got access to a diverse range of smart & creative folk.
I don't think it was that long ago that communities of humans were quite small, and the number of peers your age around you would easily fall into the 20-750 range.
Those communities did still suffer from the social ills being described. Personally I agree, having the freedom to 'reset' my group of peers every 3-4 years through to uni ended up being pretty valuable in making me a better, more open minded and more creative person than I might've been otherwise.
In the UK, you attend highscool between 11-16 with it being common to then spend 16-18 at what we call sixth-form at the same school.
This is just an additional two grades surrounded by the same kids and teachers.
Luckily for me, my highschool has no sixth-form. Therefore I went to a dedicated sixth-form college. A large college of 2000 students over two year groups.
I really enjoyed this time. I shedded all associations except for my closest friends and made new friend circles. It refined my character. And when I started university, the whole process was much easier.
> Being with mostly the same 20-750 kids (depending on school size) in your grade for most of your growing up seems cruel. You're going to change a lot, but the social dynamics can only evolve so much. The lack of ability to reinvent yourself, to re-find place is starkly different than the rest of the world, where that activity & the newness of other people is perpetual.
It is also cruel to do the opposite, perhaps more cruel.
Honestly, I think "reinvention" is overvalued/oversold in contemporary culture, and I'd reckon most kids (and adults) would be better served by maintaining their existing friendships and social patterns instead of forcing a change for change's sake.
There have been a long list of technological development to separate having sex from marriage / having children (from contraceptives in the 70s to loud electric/house music where personalities are not important to Facebook that allows global matchmaking to Tinder that allows global matchmaking in parallel execution).
Globally everybody is getting less than what media (and social media) peomised them, but we have to live long enough to understand the destruction it causes in our own lives.
I'm currently suffering from a serious case of distrust and cynicism over anything related to medical health news, I wonder if this is widespread? The very first thing that popped into my head reading this was, "Probably just a another coordinated marketing campaign by pharmaceutical interests aimed at increasing the prescription of anti-depressants to teenagers", and the data from the CDC also made me uneasy:
> "The Youth Risk Behavior Survey was given to 17,000 adolescents at high schools across the United States in the fall of 2021. The survey is conducted every two years, and the rates of mental health problems have gone up with every report since 2011, Dr. Ethier said."
Is this really enough data to come to any solid conclusions? What's the seasonal spread, for example, do you get big differences if you run the survey in June or July? What's the socioeconomic spread on the data? Are there major differences in reporting between boys and girls? Can this be accepted as a real trend with any confidence? I just don't know about this stuff anymore.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that is ultimately the outcome, REGARDLESS of whether this is a coordinated effort, or not. Decision makers and employees need to cover their behind, and kicking the can down to the doctors and pharma is the safest bet for the school admins etc. I mean, the laws and morés have become such that they ignore the parents’ wishes now, regarding gender transition, or even taking away their kids if they allow them to roam freely outside. It’s a completely different society, and everyone would rather medicate the problems away than confront our economic systems and social norms to solve problems upstream — by, say, giving everyone a UBI so they can spend more time with their own kids.
> Is this really enough data to come to any solid conclusions?
Tech companies with market caps that dwarf the largest pharma companies would like you to think "no."
IIRC, these mental health trend-lines started to rapidly get worse at almost exactly the same time that smartphones and social media started to take off.
> distrust and cynicism over anything related to medical health news, I wonder if this is widespread?
I doubt it. The problem with this approach is that in general you won't have the answers you want/need. So in the end you'll leave with more questions than answers, and that is not a great feeling.
And even if you did had all the answers, most people don't have the time to fully understand them.
Besides that, I don't think that 'medical health news' have anything special. This should apply to all subjects.
I don't think you're wrong to be cynical, but I think that to an extent the increasing mental health concerns about children make sense given that we've just come out of an especially socially debilitating period.
I've been getting to see through my niece how much the 2 years hurt her social development. She's just a kindergartner. so she can probably still recover, but I imagine it's much harder for kids who missed out on their early teens and learning to cope with problems without being in a comfortable place/without a parent one door away.
> I'm currently suffering from a serious case of distrust and cynicism over anything related to medical health news, I wonder if this is widespread?
I feel the same way but at this point it isn't suffering for me. I open nyt and see something pharma/mental health/etc related and assume it's someone advocating some lifestyle that benefits the pharma industry
I mean, this is sort of our economic system: manipulating people into being more profitable. It makes zero sense to me why some people decide to selectively trust based off of whatever is trending in political discourse. Most strangers who want to reach you want to sell you something. Maybe some people have trouble accepting that we live in an actual dystopia? Idk
> Edit: why disagree without any response? These are legitimate questions. Are we not curious hackers here?
Because in the full paragraph, it's very clear what was intended:
> The findings, based on surveys given to teenagers across the country, also showed high levels of violence, depression and suicidal thoughts among lesbian, gay and bisexual youth. More than one in five of these students reported attempting suicide in the year before the survey, the agency found.
On the other hand:
> > “We need to talk about what’s happening with teenage boys that might be leading them to perpetrate sexual violence.”
> Are they all teen boys, or could it be that there older predators at play here?
I actually think that's a valid question that's left unaddressed by the article, especially given that as I usually see the data presented, threats of this kind of thing, for kids and adolescents, overwhelmingly comes from relatives or trusted adults—if that's becoming less-true even as rates rise, that's a pretty big deal. Buuuuut I can see why readers would just DV your whole post, given the two things you chose to call out and that one of them is already answered by the article, such that it looks like you're trying to cherry-pick with a bit of an edgy slant.
What was confusing for me was that they mentioned the nationwide survey in the first sentence of the paragraph. I can now see they were focusing on gay, lesbian, and bi. Thanks.
Modding down doesn't necessarily mean disagreement. The post is incoherent as written. It would be easier to engage with if you clarified what you meant. As it stands it's just noise which I'd guess is why people downvoted it.
"A new report finds an "overwhelming wave of violence and trauma" and never-before-seen levels of hopelessness and suicidal thoughts among high school students in the U.S."
My guess is that a lot of this is due to redefining "violence and trauma" and emphasizing victimhood. If you're constantly told you're oppressed and being subjected to "violence" then you're more likely to react accordingly. A lot of reality is subjective, especially as it relates to happiness or sadness.
This isn’t really a conclusion backed by what we know. You don’t traumatize people by telling them they have been traumatized. That’s just not how trauma works. Trauma happens to people regardless of whether or not they believe they’re traumatized: this is how we can study that beating your kids results in statistically worse outcomes even though I’m sure the parents told the kids multiple times that their beatings were justified and not traumatic.
If anything maybe these statistics are so alarming is because we as a society didn’t categorize abuse as abuse until recently. Consider that raping one’s wife was legal until recently. Beating children was considered normal until a generation or so ago. Trying to force gay people to convert to straight was the medically condoned treatment. All sorts of abhorrent behaviors were normalized and people simply denied the harm it was causing.
No, we have a definition of psychological trauma. Psychological trauma describes a complex set of degenerated capacities after experiencing a shock or perceived threat particularly to one’s or loved one’s life. You can actually measure trauma by the degeneration of cognitive skills, adaptability, etc. I know we’re so blasé about trauma these days, so it sounds easy to dismiss it as woo. But consider again that maybe it’s only now that society is good enough that we can even conceive of measuring psychological damage like it isn’t normal. (It used to be normal for women to die of infection post childbirth… until it turns out this one weird guy with some germ theory woo washed his hands! And he was seeing this germ woo everywhere!)
There's a huge difference between mortality of childbirth and psychological trauma. The later does not seem to have significant enough research to support your point of view. I found a few papers, and they all seem to suffer from small samples sizes (under 100) and methodological issues (measure cognitive skills, and only use income as a confounder, rather than parent's cognitive skills, which are highly hereditary).
Not sure what studies you are finding, but adverse childhood experiences have studies with an n of over 10,000 people. We can directly correlate specific traumatic events to lifetime outcomes and mental illness.
> Consider that raping one’s wife was legal until recently
I actually woke up to that one just recently. Turns out in WA lack of verbal consent from your wife could leave one with up to 5 years in prison if your relationship goes haywire and the wife turns vengeful for whatever reasons (which is not uncommon). Getting to know that - have fun having sex if you are even slightly insecure about your relationship.
From reading that law even obtaining a written advance consent from your own wife before each intercourse won't guarantee you won't land in prison because any consent is revocable at any moment by exhibiting vague elusive behavior. And even if there's no evidence apart from the partner's word, just the chance of getting on trial does not sound fun at all.
That's not to mention that any consent is null while under alcohol influence. So better not to have sex when your partner is drunk (regardless if you're drunk too) even if you've been married for many years.
Click "Download Report." This specific article is about Page 59 to 61 (both PDF pages and embedded page numbers) for "Feelings of Sadness or Hopelessness" and pages 63 to 66 for "Seriously Considered Attempting Suicide."
TL;DR: Between 2011 and 2021 -- "Feelings of Sadness or Hopelessness" has increased for males 8%, and 21% for females. The "Seriously Considered Attempting Suicide" has increased 1% for males and 11% for females. "Make a suicide plan" has increased 1% for males, and 9% for females.
PS - The CDC uses the terms "males" and "females" in the linked report, which is what I am reproducing here rather than altering the language which could add confusion or inaccuracy.
The survey shows that 57% of teen girls feel "persistently sad or hopeless."
Persistent sadness and hopelessness is not the kind of thing that you'll get a useful answer for when you directly ask why they feel that way.
That said, the article mentions several factors that are contributing to the increase in sadness and violence among teenage girls in the United States. Some of the root causes mentioned in the article include traumatic experiences, including sexual violence; interpersonal stress from school, peers and home; a rise in violent behavior, particularly targeting girls; and stigma and violence toward LGBTQ+ teenagers
The CDC has investigated psychological illnesses (such as depression, addiction) for decades.
Depression can lead to addiction which can directly impact communicable diseases (a subset of disease in general), or hereditary disease onset (another subset of diseases in general).
Edit to add the CDC mission statement:
CDC works 24/7 to protect America from health, safety and security threats, both foreign and in the U.S. Whether diseases start at home or abroad, are chronic or acute, curable or preventable, human error or deliberate attack, CDC fights disease and supports communities and citizens to do the same.
CDC increases the health security of our nation. As the nation’s health protection agency, CDC saves lives and protects people from health threats. To accomplish our mission, CDC conducts critical science and provides health information that protects our nation against expensive and dangerous health threats, and responds when these arise.
> CDC works 24/7 to protect America from health, safety and security threats
When I drive by Buford Highway at 3 AM, the CDC is a total ghost town. I'm sure they have on-call personnel for infrequent, high-priority events and a skeleton crew for passaging cells on schedule. It's not like they're all hanging out down the block at the Pho 24 or Waffle House thinking about diseases during their midnight break, though. These are cushy office jobs.
That said, one of the directors lives in my building. Total night owl. So maybe the 24/7 part is true in spirit.
I just checked out their career section and the first posting I clicked on was for an epidemiologist in Angola[1]. It appears the sun never sets on the CDC empire.
[1] - At least part of the duties involve the embassy. So presumably watching out for US citizens in Angola.
I'm sorry, but that has been a problem for decades now and has been made worse by social media and the covid pandemic. Yes. Has there been any noticeable development in better counselling and/or higher availability of any mental health professionals over those same decades?
The only change I've noticed as an adult trying to find affordable therapy is the rise of every podcast on earth advertising for Better Help. Which I trust about as much as any other product I've been asked to buy during a podcast.
Local therapy offerings are a joke with most of my local options being religious driven programs/therapists. Insurance coverage of mental health issues even on my work based insurance is non-existent. I don't see this problem going away any time soon.
What sort of plan do you have? All ACA compliant plans should cover mental health at this point. A lot of people are getting therapy for $10 a session copay these days.
Yet suicides declined during the pandemic years.[1]
"But about 57 percent of girls and 69 percent of gay, lesbian or bisexual teenagers reported feeling sadness every day for at least two weeks during the previous year."
At least two weeks of sadness per year? That's a very low threshold.
The long term teen suicide trend is up, since the early 2000s.[2] The last two years don't show a huge variation from the trend.
Long shot but this could also be reflective of not being in hostile environments as often or being less prone to in person bullying. Of course this could be offset by social media bullying and negativity.
The report was talking about teenage girls. While the overall populate suicide rate may be improving/stable, the article claims teenage girls are in crisis.
CDC report on overall population. [1] Provisional data from CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics indicate that both the number and the rate of suicides in the United States increased 4 percent from 2020 to 2021, after two consecutive years of decline in 2019 and 2020.The rate of suicides per 100,000 increased from 13.5 in 2020 to 14.0 in 2021, which is still lower than the modern peak of 14.2 in 2018.
CDC report on teenage girls. [2] indicated that young females had both higher and increasing rates of ED visits for suicide attempts compared with males (8). However, the findings from this study suggest more severe distress among young females than has been identified in previous reports during the pandemic
There is absolutely no mystery here, and it's got nothing to do with social media:
[1]
Of note: 18% of teen girls said they had experienced some form of sexual violence in the past year, compared to only 5% of teen boys.
The rate of teen girls who have experienced sexual violence has increased by 20% since 2017, when the CDC first started tracking the measure, per ABC News. "The percentage of male students who experienced sexual violence by anyone did not change," the report stated. Nearly 15% of teen girls said they had ever been forced to have sex, a 27% jump from 2019 and the first increase since the CDC began tracking the metric, per the Washington Post.
4% of teen boys said they had ever been forced to have sex, with no increase reported.
The exact threshold used in the question probably doesn't matter that much, so long as survey is consistent over the years, so that it can show a trend.
People just developed new ways to kill themselves.
>"Drug overdose deaths have risen fivefold over the past 2 decades. In 2021, 106,699 deaths occurred, resulting in an age-adjusted rate of 32.4 per 100,000 standard population. From 2020 through 2021, the rate for males increased from 39.5 to 45.1, and the rate for females increased from 17.1 to 19.6. In both 2020 and 2021, adults aged 35–44 had the highest rate among people aged 15 and over. Between 2020 and 2021, the largest percentage increase in rates occurred among those aged 65 and over (28%). In both 2020 and 2021, rates were highest for non-Hispanic AIAN people; however, the greatest percentage increase in rates from 2020 to 2021 occurred for non-Hispanic NHOPI people.
The rates of drug overdose deaths involving different types of opioids and stimulants also increased from 2020 to 2021. Increases in rates occurred for drug overdose deaths involving psychostimulants with abuse potential (from 7.5 to 10.0), synthetic opioids other than methadone (17.8 to 21.8), and cocaine (6.0 to 7.3). Rates were similar for drug overdose deaths involving natural and semisynthetic opioids, as well as deaths involving methadone. Of the drugs examined, only drug overdose deaths involving heroin had a lower rate in 2021 than in 2020 (2.8 and 4.1, respectively).
Limitations and methodological questions about OP aside, I really question whether our modern lifestyle and all the technologies that enable it have led to increased human thriving. Medical advances have obviously been huge in making life longer and less painful for the (lucky subsets of the) masses. But setting that aside, is life today (in a rich western country) more "enjoyable" or "fulfilling" now than it was, say, 500 years ago? What about 200 or 100? Or 5000? IDK, but increasingly it feels like a simple life in a small insular community with limited access to information is a better setup for "human thriving" than what we're living in today.
Obviously life is much "easier" today from the perspective of material conditions, but why assume that this is a "good" thing?
Or maybe I'm just a delusional Teddy K fanboy who's sick of typing on a computer all day, day after day, year after year.
> But setting that aside, is life today (in a rich western country) more "enjoyable" or "fulfilling" now than it was, say, 500 years ago?
Wander a graveyard from the 1800s and see how many very young children are listed on the headstones below their parents. How do we account for "a bunch of your kids are likely to die" in this metric?
It's easy to look with rose-hued glasses at the past and imagine an idylic pastoral lifestyle. The reality was quite a bit more complicated.
There are a lot of exceptions. Strawberries in winter. Ice cream in summer. Contact with relatives on the other side of the world in an instant. Travel to Europe in hours. Unlimited fresh water. Indoor plumbing. Universal access to education. YouTube videos to learn how to use and fix a tool. etc. etc. etc.
All those things are great, or at least you and I think they are.
But that's not the question. The question is do those things make for greater human thriving and fulfillment? Increasing things that people find pleasurable does not necessarily have this effect. As a simple and extreme example, consider heroin.
I read a lot of old stuff, with a focus on anything I can find from regular people. I used to think like you do. I'm much less convinced nowadays that we've really made people's lives better in a meaningful, non-material way, excepting a very few examples that GP already alluded to (e.g., reduction in infant mortality, which accounts for virtually the entire life expectancy increase since 1850.)
Yeah this is pretty much my line of thinking. Not making any grand claims, just questioning the conventional wisdom. No doubt that the material conditions, health, and conveniences of today are unparalleled in history, that's just not what I'm talking about right now.
I think you are talking about "meaning" in life, the sense of being part of something larger than yourself, that isn't just accumulation for accumulation's sake. There is a debate there, no doubt.
The scientists and engineers that work insane hours at SpaceX are probably looking for something like that.
But in the past, for most people, life was merely a struggle to survive, that they lost sooner rather than later.
"Struggle to survive" gives meaning to life though. And one of the best ways to form deep connections with people is shared hardship.
It's really hard to say what's "better" in any sort of objective and quantifiable way; but it seems to me that by making the basics of life very easy we've sort of lost something along the way.
After all, playing a game that's so easy that it doesn't provide any challenge isn't much fun either, right?
The "Struggle to survive" gives meaning to life though.
No, it doesn't, this is just one of those banal transcendental platitudes that gets repeated enough to where it sounds like it's some sort of objective truth. Like the one about how "life only has meaning because it is short and ephemeral". By that logic an aborted fetus has had the richest life of all.
Life's meaning is ultimately in the eyes of the beholder. We all derive meaning differently, there is no universal solvent.
I think of this a lot whenever I hear people complain the world is too luxurious. I mean really people do have the option to live in more squalid conditions but they seem like they'd rather wax poetic behind their keyboards. It smacks of insincerity.
I would very much argue diet IF properly utilized can indeed change your life for the better. Better nutrition just makes you feel good all the time while also making you live longer.
In the past they had to worry about growing wheat and not getting eaten by wolves, today they are mildly depressed at dislikes in twitter. You think it's a worse situation? I think people from the past would laugh at twitter problems.
Have you spent much time with people who deeply ruminate over their online persona? Not only is it a thing but very alarmingly people quickly go sideways into weird places. In a way I feel that less immediate suffering around us has led us to simply displace that bucket of pain into other areas of our lives. So better in a sense yes but the perceived improvement ... I"m not sure that many people are emotionally reaping the benefits.
I think in the context of your question, you're turning "thriving" from an attempt at objective measurement to an entirely subjective metric. Feel free to correct me if that isn't the case, but if it becomes subjective to thrive, I don't know that there is a right or wrong answer to "in which era are people thriving the most?"
Yeah that's pretty much where I end up: what it means to "thrive" is subjective and there's just not really a matter of the fact about what lifestyle is "best" for humans. Nevertheless, there are some scenarios that I think would be close to universally viewed as worse or better than others. I think the era we're living in now is close to being universally viewed as better than the past. Grass is always greener though I spose
I would add that there is such diversity among humans that what pleases or contents one will bore and anguish another. There is no single solution which is optimal for all.
Measuring well-being is a whole field of study. Surveying happiness is part of it. But the surveys don't go back very far.
Happiness has been going up worldwide but it has been dropping in the US since 2010. Which might be a part of this post.
There is Human Development Index (HDI) that is used to compare countries. It is based on life expectancy, education, and income. By those measures, there has been a huge increase in the last two centuries. And a big increase in many countries in last 50 years. But that more covers physical not emotional needs.
I think that parent meant "thriving" in the sense of emotionally, or perhaps spiritually. If we measure the number of people who are lonely, feel their lives are meaningless, and have no hope to be increasing rather than decreasing, then I think that's a pretty objective measure that we're not thriving.
"Medical advances have obviously been huge in making life longer and less painful for the (lucky subsets of the) masses."
Even this much is not clear. The economist Robert Gordon has argued, to my mind pretty persuasively, that medicine (i.e. doctors, hospitals, routine checkups) has received undue credit for improvements in health between 1870-1970 that are actually attributable to improved sanitation, diet, vaccination, etc.
I find it weird to define medicine in a way that excludes sanitation and vaccination. The other elephant in the room is antibiotics, which have managed to make many previously lethal infections manageable or even trivial.
> Analysis of the mid-Victorian period in the U.K. reveals that life expectancy at age 5 was as good or better than exists today, and the incidence of degenerative disease was 10% of ours.
Medical advances for adults since 1870 have mostly done little besides hold the line on keeping us alive through the effects of increased pollution, worse diets, and lower physical activity.
This is really, really disturbing when you think about how much of GDP is dedicated to health care.
I think you’re undervaluing the importance of 1) not starving and 2) being able to drink clean water. I’d also point out that the economic conditions of 500-150 years ago were predicated on slavery, serfdom, female guardianship and colonialism. Even if you look only at the life of the average white man they were largely bound to live as serfs, and exist in state of total oppression. I’m sure some had a better life, but the majority of people lived and died in abject poverty as the playthings of a militarized elite.
People forget that the 8 hour workday, paid time off, and every other workers right were won at a price of blood [1].
But on the topic of people being better off I would also disagree strongly: the wealthy were the wealthy, and still poorer today in everyway that matters. The King of France might've notionally had an army, but all his money in the world couldn't buy the inspiration, creativity or organizational skill which made indoor plumbing possible.
This appears to be a hidden Flint reference, so I must point out Flint's water was fixed in 2019 and people have yet to stop trying to claim it's still bad.
Flint was only one example sadly, there's a surprising number of communities in the US who are, or recently have been, unable to get drinkable water from their tap. Often for reasons like crumbling infrastructure, lead, or other contaminants. Seriously, search whatever state you like and you'll probably find there is, or recently was, large numbers of Americans there under orders to avoid drinking their water or only using it after boiling it.
I have yet to see a national map of every area where the water isn't safe to drink, but I'd recommend checking cities in your area often and checking any place you plan on visiting because it rarely gets a lot of attention. I expect things to get even worse once we get federally enforced standards and rules for PFAS contamination.
Not going to compare centuries, but from a day to day perspective I don't see that many people truly 'thriving'. The human mind/body loves homeostasis though. I see a good amount of people who are generally happy, or at least content, some settling into family life with newborns, many who are trying to find themselves(a quest that often gets interrupted by hours of mindless scrolling on app X). The medical advances of today are often prolonging painful existences, but humans are very adaptable to that kind of pain(have personal experience with this one).
There is something to your comment of life being easier(and not necessarily being a good thing). Fruits and vegetables often grow the best harvests when they are challenged(wind, rain, etc...) and I think this is also reflective of the human condition. I'm not saying go to war tomorrow so you can experience hardship, but there are ways to make life more challenging so that when true challenges arise, one can be a little stronger. I think we are losing some of this grit today.
Every generation will say that the generation after them is losing grit. When we solve problems or make tasks easier, that gives us time for other tasks. How much grit is actually necessary and who needs grit the most?
It would be helpful to be specific about what challenging behavior encourages grit or not. e.g. Going to the DMV does not improve my patience or make me a better person. To your point: What should we make challenging? Or better yet, how can we scale challenges to encourage grit?
Humans have limited energy and time resources to expend on being alive. We divert the energy spent on challenging things that don't matter to high-profile items, not necessarily better problems.
Conversely, what about the damages of going through too much challenge that you don't have the ability to meet? Does it always turn out OK after you've failed beyond belief? Is the ability to overcome challenges (beyond your basic day to day) even matter? SOME people might be able to improve the world by becoming resilient to challenge but MOST people will not affect the world in any way meaningfully in the long-term (even if they are a part of a team that does).
My point was that practicing something like better patience may make an otherwise stressful DMV visit an ordinary affair. No one will ever know which challenges they will get presented with in life, but you can bet most people will eventually have to deal with massive loss of some sort or a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. For a high school kid this might be that paper that is due in 2 days, for others it might be a car crash that kills both parents.
Grit is developed in part by hearing that little voice in your head that says “I don’t feel like doing this” and then going out and doing that thing. I wouldn’t necessarily expect others to lay out a curriculum for you to develop these types of things. It could be going for a mile run or helping a coworker on a Friday afternoon, it doesn’t have to be going on a 25 mile run every other day.
While improving the world could be an end result, the main driver is probably just to have a more manageable existence for oneself.
Lastly, it doesn’t always turn out okay, and knowing how to deal with that needs to be part of the toolbox.
Just my opinion, but I think life is better now than it was when I was a teenager in the 80's. I think a lot of you have forgotten how mind-crushingly boring your teenage years were.
I think the nuance that is lost is that the "better" is not uniform. The previous world worked better for some people, the current one works better for others. It is probably a net gain on the whole, but the dispersion of results might be stronger than the underlying trend.
Averages are what make comparisons hard - there is a lot of variation within the averages. Truckers in the U.S., for example, were way better off in 1970 than they are today (in relative terms). But an average factory worker in China was way worse off.
Maybe it was more boring, not sure, but at least all the stupid stuff I did at the time wasn't documented on the internet. I don't know how I'd handle that.
I was a teenager in the 90's and don't remember it being particularly boring. There was plenty of TV & movies, video games, teenage shenanigans, school clubs, etc. I suppose video games had kind of a golden age in the 90's with the 4th (SNES) and 5th (PS1, N64) console generations, and PC games like Doom, Quake, Blizzard's first games in their franchises, etc. On second thought without all that I would have been a lot more bored.
I recommend Laslett's "The World We Have Lost" (or its second edition, "The World We Have Lost Further Explored"), for a glimpse of life a mere 200 years ago. You'll need to pay close attention and read between the lines, though.
If you're ever lucky enough to ask someone in a western nation who came of age before World War II "What made the biggest positive difference in quality of life over the 20th century?" they'd most likely say "penicillin". It makes a tremendous positive difference not having to deal with the constant barrage of severe disease and death that was so common before modern vaccines and antibiotics.
At the same time, death to many of us has become little more than an abstract concept, something relegated mostly to the very old. With less suffering and death, we have less to ground us in an inescapable urgency about life, or a sense of immediate and pressing purpose. I'm convinced if it weren't for penicillin and vaccines, people would generally take life more seriously; there'd also be a lot more religious feeling, fervor, and searching.
Modern medical care, sanitation, and fantastic dietary options seem pretty great, sure would suck a lot to miss out on those.
Stuff like the internet is what I would call a mixed bag. I think we really underestimate how incredible it is to be able to look up how to do anything, fix anything, learn anything pretty much in a few clicks. Yet the para-social stuff is the new cigarettes. Pro-Ana and Incel communities being rather extreme examples of this where men and women are getting severely depressed over 5 pounds or a few millimeters of chin where they proceed to talk eachother into starving to death or getting limb lengthening surgery and well if they’re doing it you have to do it too if you want to keep up…
Post agriculture I suppose it is pretty easy to argue that times were tougher in the past (medieval serfs got more days off and did way less work than we do today, but I'll concede that I'd rather my kids be alive and put in 40 hr/week).
Pre agriculture, which is the majority of human history? That's where things get interesting. People in hunter gatherer tribes lived long lives (assuming they survived childhood), didn't suffer from most of the things we need modern medicine and sanitation for (because those things are a result of agriculture itself), and "worked" about 30 hours per week if we use modern hunter gatherers like the !kung as proxies, and their "work" was doing things we do for relaxation these days like hunting, gathering, and foraging.
Unfortunately, there's no going back, so you better make sure you've got yourself a good keyboard.
500 years ago people had technical problems with life. To survive today you only need to not do stupid things like social networks, MSM and web 2.0. We just aren't used to them. Some people even doubt they are dangerous! It's as if you thought dirty fruits are okay.
Gun violence is hardly rampant in the US. The violence is heavily concentrated in a few neighborhood of a few cities. We should absolutely do more to reduce violence in those areas, but the vast majority of teen girls have never seen a gun fired outside of a shooting range or hunting preserve. My city has zero shootings most years.
To pretend that young girls aren't affected by hearing about the frequent school/mass shootings in the US is pretty ridiculous. That affects them far more than gang violence in "a few neighborhoods of a few cities"-- it's something that they relate to directly, whether someone they know has been shot at in an educational setting or not. Spare us the firearm fundamentalist talking points.
Edit: Also, gun violence isn't rampant in the US? Compared to what? Certainly rampant compared to any peer society.
That's what the news choose to report. If they talked instead about car crashes, those teen girls would refuse to be around cars, and if the news talked about diabetes, cancer and heart diseases - the true dangers in our society - those teen girls would be paranoidal about their sugar level and blood pressure.
The news talks about car crashes all the time. It also covers chronic disease, which can somewhat be mitigated through personal lifestyle choices (assuming one isn't among the large impoverished population of the US). Mass shootings happen all the time in the US (more than one per day on average) and are only reported nationally at this point when the body count is high enough.
Haven't read enough of his essay to form an opinion yet, but I very much appreciate the following from the intro. Engaging with reasonable skepticism is important.
> In sum, it’s reasonable to start with skepticism of my claim (with Jean Twenge) that there is an epidemic of mental illness that began around 2012, and that is related in large part to the transition to phone-based childhoods, with a special emphasis on social media. It makes sense to embrace as a null hypothesis the skeptics’ view that there is nothing to see here, just another moral panic, and the kids are fine. I am in full agreement that the burden of proof falls on me.
The DSM-5 was released in 2013 with some extensive changes - but this is not mentioned in Jonathan Haidt’s essay.
The DSM-5 had several changes in diagnosis that could explain the sharp rise in his graphs. That we simply got a view of how bad our society’s mental health is, rather than it increasing at a dramatically higher rate than pre-2012.
Diagnosis around women’s mental health has also become much better in recent years. The amount of gaslighting around disorders and “hysteria” in women historically is troubling and completely unethical.
I find Gabor Mate’s work much more enlightening in understanding why mental health is such an issue in the modern world. I highly recommend his books if you are curious.
Gabor’s definition of addiction is that it is a coping mechanism to seek relief from pain, often with negative consequences. Therefore social media does not explain the pain. It’s an effect not a cause, despite how it can contribute to feelings of loneliness and inadequacy.
Instead it is worth understanding how our youth are raised, and the trauma their parents carry onto them despite their best intentions and effort.
Addiction meant something in old 1500s Latin. It meant to 'devote or give onself up to a habit or practice'.
Offering one's self up to social media can allow you to mechanistically escape pain, but it also does damage at the same time.
The more you offer yourself up to social media, you are giving away a chunk of your mental health to be liked and adored by instagram.
How could anyone own their mental health, when you can dump your hopes and dreams into the void anytime you want, to offer yourself up in hopes of relief.
I know that people mentioned you can't jump to the conclusion that it's social media, but on a personal level with two teen girls I have noticed something interesting.
Taking into account my friends/acquaintances that I'm familiar with their kids, so a sample of probably about 25ish teen girls. There is a big correlation of social media/cell phone access and issues.
Bullying, exposed to adult content, comparing yourself to others, drama, all have one consistent source, social media and cell phone apps. Personally, I don't allow social media, and my kids don't have cell phone access. They're in a very tiny minority compared to their peers. To me the benefits of this far outweigh any drawbacks.
I'm not saying that bullying doesn't happen outside social media, or anything like that, however, there definitely seems to be a heavy correlation between cell phone use and general teen angst. My girls, a small sample of two, seem to not have the same issues their peers have.
I strongly recommend evaluating the use of cell phones with your children for their own mental and emotional well-being. It has actually made me use social media a lot less because of it.
I wonder which way the causality runs. Does using too much social media make your life suck, or do you run to using social media when you have a rough life?
Even if the causality runs "life sucks" -> "social media", the effects of turning to social media to deal with stress are different than those of turning to alcohol or comics or D&D or whatever else kids had access to in the past. It's probably worth exploring the effects either way.
For me there is things you do that give you long term satisfaction and things you do that give you short term satisfaction.
I think both have a purpose and a place. However it's inherently obvious that things that are only short term satisfaction and the most dangerous, because you keep repeating the cycle.
For example liking memes is a short burst, a second later they are no longer relevant. For others it's shopping. You get a mini-high, but a few moments later that's gone. A lot of people seem to just keep pressing the button, get a droplet of happiness and press the button more time. That becomes a vicious cycle.
Essentially if your actions today are identical to tomorrow and nothing has changed, you are stuck in a loop. I'm not trying to argue that everyone needs to be hyper-productive all the time. What I'm talking about is if all your hobbies are consumption, you might be stuck.
D&D, which I play is different because you are doing it in a social setting. It's more like socializing with an excuse and a purpose, you get to exercise your creativity, imagination, you are actively using your mind. Passing things like watching youtube all day or drinking don't do that.
Both! Mental illness is quite often self reinforcing outside of the original etiology - clearly so or else it wouldn’t exist as a common meta stable state.
Hell, I'd say mental state instead of illness. Being happy-go-lucky tends to be self-reinforcing in some, or we could use whomever we know that's a "Glass half full" kind of person as our example.
Have you watched the movie "Eighth Grade"[1]? To me it seemed like a pretty insightful look into adolescence in the presence of social media and smart phones. However, not being a teenage girl myself nor having any kids I'm not sure how true to life it is.
> I don't allow social media, and my kids don't have cell phone access.
How is this working out? I assume your kids must have healthy social lives and don't feel left out, otherwise you'd have reconsidered. My kids will get to device-using age someday and I'd love to do something similar with mine. But am somewhat amazed that parents can enforce this even at the teenager stage.
I have a ninth grade daughter who we don't allow a smart phone. She has a dumb phone without group text. She still has friends that hang out at school, games, Starbucks etc. She is the only one in her friend group without a smart phone. Not having all the social media apps is great for her. Yes, she misses out on group texts, chat, silly non-sense, but she can check out at night, and focus on homework or going to bed.
Just to be clear my oldest, now in 8th grade does ask occasionally to have a phone still. I gave her a pre-pay flip phone for emergencies, it can text and call, that's pretty much it. She also has a simple mp3 player for music that I put mp3s in, no internet access.
They also have access to Youtube using my old phone. However, I have very clear rules about Youtube, which I can share if someone is curious. Finally, they have Amazon tablets with parental settings for their age group, and pretty much everything disabled except for books and kid apps.
I'm explaining all of this so people can understand that they have access to some electronics. Basically, I have covered some electronic needs that they have like music, watching an occasional video, play video games.
One of the advantages is by having specific devices for specific things I know what they are doing without having to watch over them.
Youtube is the biggest exposure my kids have. I have my account logged in, so I can see what they watch, they know this. With no adult settings. Moreover, there is only one time they are allowed to watch Youtube it's an hour and all 4 of them take turns. This has actually created something I didn't expect, it forces them to find common videos they can all enjoy, or they just won't watch at specific days that the videos are "boring".
If I look at the history and find a problematic video I will set expectations, reminders and sometimes I outright block certain channels. What's interesting is now that they have been doing this for a few years they monitor themselves. I hear them say "we can't watch that, find a different video".
To answer the other part of the question of do they "healthy social lives". They do. I actually thing social media gives you a false sense of socializing. "Look at all the friends / likes I have". Instead, my kids actually talk to other kids or play. My oldest is more into hang out, draw, listen to music kind of thing. Overall, my wife is really social by nature, she has what I call people magic, so my kids have learned to emulate that. We coincidentally moved to a new house this year, within a week they had established multiple friends and befriended the entire neighborhood.
Boredom helps, we all try to avoid it like the plague, but being bored allows you to become more creative. My kids go outside more, it helps that I have 4 because they can play with each other if no one else is around.
I don't want to pretend my kids are perfect, and I am an amazing dad. They have faults, so do I, a lot of them. To me the key is setting clear expectations and explaining the why. The joke in my house is they will probably learn how to drive before they have a cellphone. Honestly that might happen.
The main gist is adult or unknown content is not OK. Video game, creative (draw, paint etc), educational videos are fine.
Of course, I have had to refine these rules as things came up.
No TikTok videos on Youtube (the inappropriate to OK videos ratio is way to hit)
No funny prank videos (because most of them are people being mean to others)
No scarry videos unless it's kid Halloween videos and all the kids are OK with watching it (remember they share one screen and take turns on deciding)
Funny animal videos are fine.
Music videos are fine if we have watched it already with them, if they are not sure add "lyrics" to the end of the song and watch the lyric version or ask us (they just opt for lyrics to avoid having to ask/waiting)
If someone uses naughty words once it can be ignored, if they do it a lot especially if the 6-year-old is watching it's an auto change and the youtuber to be avoided (We allow our kids to curse in their rooms if they wish, but not at each other, in public, school or people that might have a problem with it, like their grandparents)
No videos from random channels about boyfriend/girlfriend drama, unknown origin animations about love stories (ratio of inappropriate language, innuendo, sexism, misogyny, abuse is too high). Again, they can ask if they are not sure.
I think that's pretty much it. Every few days, mainly when I watch a youtube video (probably every 2-3 days) I will look at the history. If I find something borderline I will watch the video briefly, if there is a problem, I will explain what it was, if it turns out it was an OK video I will move on.
If I find problematic youtubers I will block them, this is rare, but it has happened. I also see what the Youtube algo suggests, if I see a suggestion that seems iffy, I will mark it as not interested so my kids won't be drawn to it. As time has progressed their feed has gotten cleaner, and they understand what they can and cannot watch better.
Oh, and another thing I have Youtube Premium to avoid ads, because for some reason Google allows some really weird advertisements for children at times. I basically replaced my Spotify subscription for this, and started listening to Google music.
Social media has been proven to play a huge role. I attended a seminar by Dr. Leonard Sax several years ago, and even then during the presentation he cited several papers about this matter, mentioning that it affects girls disproportionately more than boys.
I have several daughters.
There is a huge inverse relationship between teens happiness and social media.
Our oldest Teen would be happy, respectful involved in the family. Be allowed back on social media within a few days. She was rude, disrespectful depressed, and just sat in bed all day. We would take it away within a couple of days she was back to her old happy self.
Repeat this for several years.
The entire time she insisted, I did not affect her.
As an adult now she stays off of it, and strongly discourages her sisters from using social media and regrets being on it.
> There is a big correlation of social media/cell phone access and issues.
Social media is a convenient scapegoat. The media hates it with a passion since it completely disrupted their business model. And it allows people to completely ignore the fact that teenagers are increasingly under more and more stress with high stake testing, an increasingly competitive college admission process and increasingly grim prospects for economic mobility and long term environmental sustainability. But let's ignore all that and blame the "evil screens" and social media.
> comparing yourself to others, drama, all have one consistent source, social media and cell phone apps.
In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds." [0] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5 being obese, not just overweight. And it has more than tripled since the 70's [1]. I have to wonder if it's related. A lot of teenagers are bombarded with images of perfectly healthy bodies that, quite simply, won't match what they see in the mirror.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] thread“Kids are now vulnerable to cyberbullying and critical comments, like ‘I hate you’, ‘Nobody likes you,’” he said. “It’s like harpoons to their heart every time.”
I make my living due to technology, but if there was a big switch to throw that would turn off television/internet I'd do it without hesitation. I think the long term benefits would outweigh the short term chaos.
I've had similar thoughts, in similar terms. Put that switch in front of me and I'd toggle it with glee in my heart and a smile on my face.
A couple decades ago I was so optimistic about this stuff. In the big picture, it's done little but disappoint, since then. Same as many a great, grand idea—ruined by contact with economics and human "games".
Of course we are all suffering from mental illness and poor physical health and this that and the other thing all the time. All we do is stress out about what others think about ourselves and sit around lethargic. We didn't spend millions of years of mutation and selection to be the most optimal couch potato. We spent it to be a master forager of the environment, setting out on foot by morning for resources when the weather and light is good, and spending the day and evening in engineering or creative pursuits. I'm convinced even language had a role to play in changing our behavior dramatically in this way, since often what we do in life is limited to what we are able to communicate with words or thoughts in our language with its finite set of descriptors.
As kids increasingly interact via social media, being funny, intelligent, or creative is less important than looking good in pictures. I can't imagine how shitty this is for teenagers. We used to lament the "unattainable beauty standards" of magazines and on TV, but this seems even more harmful.
I dunno how you do this though, as even just admitting something like: "I am handicapped in the looks department" is pretty depressing. At the same time it seems messed up that someone who is attractive doesn't just get preferential treatment in their daily interactions, but can now monetize their looks easily via social media (or onlyfans lol).
There are comedic social media creators that look plain but build a style and crowd as a result.
Conversely (and as you hinted at), "I'm only liked for my looks," illustrates the double-bind at play. Yes, it's difficult to shift societal norms but I encourage folks to ask themselves, "Which other norms shifted in the last hundred years?" and how that was accomplished.
It is most potent because this happens at almost every human interaction from trivial (getting help at a store from the staff) to important (selecting a husband or a wife).
It is most prevalent because this happens across all races, religions and sexes without any inhibition. Other than the old adage, "don't judge book by its cover." people judge others based on looks all the time and feel justified in doing so. There's not even a word like racism, sexism, anti-X or X-phobia for discrimination against less attractive people.
It is least acknowledged because as you mentioned, there's no one who would like to join the "ugly" identity group. There's no commonly shared root like race, religion, sex, or ethnicity. And identifying oneself as "ugly" probably hurts the person more than it can help.
It is unfortunate that there's no foreseeable solution to this wide spread problem at all, other than voluntary empathy from the society in general. But at the same time, that may be the most important antidote to any discrimination we face rather than top-down rule of law change.
It might be even more insidious because there's a strong justification that stupid people are stupid because of their own volition. However, in reality, there's element of intelligence that's purely genetic and there's nothing a person can do.
The reason I bring it up is because I think there is an important distinction between a illogical bias and a simple preference.
People are very preoccupied with weeding out bad biases, and often mistake preferences for them. Things are only complicated more when egalitarian ideas get mixed in.
There's nothing inherently wrong about wanting a beautiful life partner or to watch an attractive Entertainer. Those are legitimate preferences. The only problem is when individuals place that as a higher priority than something else that they actually want more.
It is also very common, but also very frequently is discrimination that goes to the core of the overt purpose of the decision being made. As discrimination is simply having any factor play into a decision, the usual problem is with (1) decisions whose motivation is to cause harm to a group, or (2) decisions in which factors like membership in a group are weighed that are not germane to the overt non-malicious purpose, which cause an (unwarranted by the purpose) adverse impact on the group.
It’s prevalent and potent, but it is extremely widely acknowledged. The degree to which it is seen as problematic is more variable ("discrimination", in and of itself, is simply having a factor influence a decision, and is not universally viewed as problematic.)
> There’s not even a word like racism, sexism, anti-X or X-phobia for discrimination against less attractive people.
Yes, there is, and the word is “lookism”. [0]
> It is least acknowledged because as you mentioned, there’s no one who would like to join the “ugly” identity group.
“Ugly” isn’t an identity group. Discrimination can happen on literally any basis (every basis on which a decision is made is “discrimination”), not only by identity groups.
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lookism#:~:text=o....
> Nearly three in five teenage girls felt persistent sadness in 2021, double the rate of boys
What specific points seem lopsided here?
Here's one about male problems I remember reading and could quickly find because the title was memorable: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/08/andrew-ya...
And another with the same title: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/opinion/boys-violence-sho...
I can remember a handful of articles about boys struggling over the years but like your Yang example they have been on the opinion page and tainted with the whiff of "men's rights" grievances.
Twice the rate of self-reported, when asked persistent sadness, as boys' also self-reported rate, then.
Hell, the article even kinda covers this, noting that boys' depression may not be experienced as persistent sadness. And that's before we consider biases in tendency to report such things to begin with, which may (to put it lightly) differ between the sexes.
(Nb. it may well in-fact be true that girls are experiencing depression at double the rate of boys—but a survey's not enough to determine that)
On another topic:
> On a handful of topics, the survey results suggested teenagers were doing better than in previous years. They reported lower rates of illicit drug use and bullying at school, for example. And teenagers are having less sex, with fewer sexual partners, than in previous years.
I mean... the jokes write themselves. "No wonder they're all sad!"
As a parent, it seems strange to me to blame this situation on the pandemic when it's been, for all purposes, over in most parts of the country for more than a year. My kids have been back in school, sports, and being IRL with their friends for going on two years now.
The inability of mental health professionals to clearly separate temporary factors like pandemic isolation from the pervasive root causes that remain unaddressed is pretty frustrating. The science, if you can even call it that, is distressingly thin here and it makes me angry.
All of the data was there. It's been there the whole time.
Ed: apparently the study uses data from 2021
For example, if we talk about racial issues in this country, we don’t usually focus on the capitalist music industry using gangsta rap to export role models spewing misogynistic lyrics to Black kids many of whom identify with them, we don’t talk much about the breakdown in the nuclear family, the rise of divorces or out-of-wedlock births. (People used to — see the Moynihan report for instance.) We hardly talk about welfare traps or minimum wage laws (Milton Friedman used to etc.) We don’t talk about academic performance of Black kids being affected by stuff like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_white
Whenever Bill Cosby or Stephen A Smith or Deloris Tucker someone like that goes on a rant, they are shouted down.
That is why it is far safer to attribute it all to slavery 150 years ago, and Jim Crow laws, even though the previous generations who had marriage and school uniforms and higher church attendance etc. are horrified at what many in the current generations have been doing, and the lyrics in Drill music or Gangsta Rap etc. People are starting to wake up — I have been in a clubhouse room with 2000 people about whether a lot of rap is leading to violence, and almost everyone on stage was Black and most were saying absolutely. Some people said it creates jobs in the music industry, others pointed out how many jobs are destroyed overall because the kids can’t pass an interview. And so on. It was really nice to see but only possible because Black people got together to honestly discuss what has been going on. Now we need to turn it into action, in our own lives, with our own kids, and what they are exposed to. Most parents work so much or are divorced and the kids are raised by the street or by the government!
[1]: https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2022/22/mentale-gezondheid-j...
And anyway, one does not need to be a paragon of virtue in every fact of their life to denounce current trends. Many people who were very loud turned out to do shady things in the background. Are we supposed to look to BLM leaders for advice, for example? NAACP has a far longer track record and their leaders seem to have acted with more integrity over the decades: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-lives-matter-activ...
Smith is a windbag who riles up viewers about controversial trivia. He is less obnoxious than most such, since his topics typically relate to sports rather than politics, but nothing he has said outside the realm of sports (and fairly little he has said within it) would indicate a habit of deep thought. Tucker passed away 17 years ago, and in the preceding decade seems primarily to have been a one-note instrument. Cosby's infamy perhaps doesn't disqualify him as a source of advice, but it makes one wonder. What common thread weaves through these three seemingly different exemplars you've chosen?
I prefer to think in terms of ethics rather than morality, and in terms of timeless values rather than current events. I struggle with this, but I feel I have benefited from the works of Walter Kaufmann, Kierkegaard, and other existentialist and existentialist-adjacent thinkers. If you seek moral advice and can't find it in your bible or at church, perhaps you might appreciate e.g. Jason Whitlock? I do, but in a different way than most of his other fans, I suspect.
Cosby spent YEARS playing "America's dad" for the Black family, as did James Avery, Reginald VelJohnson and others. They provided a wholesome role model to look up to, of a married family man, who provides for his kids and teaches them manners and morals, as opposed to "role models" poppin bottles and bangin models that the rap industry provides. Misogynistic lyrics, racial slurs, materialistic lifestyles, sometimes even glorifying violence. What good does it do? If outsiders can't criticize it because it is "authentic Black expression", then it falls to Black voices to do so. And they do, increasingly.
To try to combat moral / cultural degradation and restore family values takes both economic and cultural reform.
This used to be the subject of Black sit coms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5D2RvIQwQE
And even CNN anchor Don Lemon used to OPENLY say stuff like this: https://www.cnn.com/videos/bestoftv/2013/07/27/nr-lemon-no-t...
So Steven A Smith said the same: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb4pEN3s7B8
Deloris Tucker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr6gb1w72xA
I mean, I think you're tilting at windmills here when you're going after everyone's moral character who has said similar things. I could give you a lot more examples, but they haven't and don't make a dent in the capitalist machine. It has adapted.
The reason it's on topic is because it's just a special case of what that machine sells to everyone regardless of consequences. Instagram and TikTok "influencers" have contributed massively to anxiety and depression of teenage girls, but also promote dressing and acting in ways their parents and grandparents never could.
Miley Cyrus was the "voice of a generation", a "good girl" promoted by "wholesome" Disney, then she had a coming-out with the record industry, where her biggest new talent was sticking her tongue out while naked and gripping a chain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My2FRPA3Gf8
Sex sells and nudity grabs headlines on billboards: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2157969/Rihann...
It tells women to "lean in" and work 10 hours a day instead of telling both men and women to "lean out" and spend time with their family.
Sometimes it even becomes a parody of itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNzXze5Yza8
Again, there doesn't need to be a conspiracy behind it (as Kanye believes) it's just what the market (and "the algorithm") selects for.
Look at your news, it's all become click-bait that makes ADULTS (whose brains are fully developed) into frothing-at-the-mouth rabid haters of the left, or the right, or whoever. It also radicalizes citizens into supporting destructive wars.
Look at your social media. It has made you distracted at dinner, addicted like a pav...
As C. Wright Mills wrote in The Power Elite, "To accept either view -- of all history as conspiracy or all history as drift -- is to relax the effort to understand the facts of power and the ways of the powerful." The precise form of our situation is not inevitable. Just as algorithms are written by people, so are laws and extortion notes. The tools that oppress us may be refashioned into others that free us. We must keep in mind that tools are nothing in themselves; they take on significance when used.
I do agree "that machine sells to everyone". Perhaps it makes sense to compare the situation of teen girls to that of black families like you suggest, since there is a sizable overlap between these groups. Rather than despairing of all the awful media, however, would it be better to focus on better media? The Cosby Show was produced in the 1980s, but surely there are good things happening now? Not necessarily shows on television, which is itself the sort of machine we're discussing. I've heard good things about "Black Twitter"...
Conservatism seems reasonable in the face of the issues you identify, but it's not, especially if you're following Milton Friedman on the minimum wage as you indicate above. The real minimum wage right now is barely half of the inflation-adjusted $12 it was in 1968. Had it kept pace with productivity as well as inflation, it would have been $22 by now. [0] Our enemies don't care about ideology. They happily wore the skins of Republicans before they wore the skins of Democrats, and it will be no trouble for them to switch again.
The lockdown did harm teen girls, even if we can't prove it to the scientific satisfaction of thread parent. That's not even the really bad part. What they have done once, they can and will do again. When it is normal for children to plug into a device instead of going to public school, it will be easy for some asshole billionaires to arrange that the children will just plug into their "education" apps and all the money we used to waste on teachers instead can just go to collateral for some asshole billionaire personal lines of credit. After they've done away with teachers, the McKinsey consultants will start examining whether the children really need parents. After all, they don't need a home if they're plugged into their devices...
But seriously, give Whitlock a listen, especially one of the episodes featuring Royce White. They are both better than Steven "A" Smith, in every respect.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/21/politics/minimum-wage-inflati...
By the way, I think for myself -- even though I cited Friedman, I disagree with him in various ways, after looking at the data. I am not a fiscal conservative, but I am a social conservative. I think corporations have co-opted liberal movements like women's lib, and freedom of speech, and conflated them with corporate agendas, e.g. turning feminism into "Lean In" climbing the corporate ladder for women. Freedom of speech actually suffers under capitalism, because the one who pays the piper calls the tune. Those with million of "followers" have social capital, and we should be more concerned about how they got "platformed" than whether they would be "deplatformed". Their profit motive and incentive structure leads them to corrupt society with their controversial, incorrect, corrosive rhetoric which is passed off as "entertainment" the minute it's criticized (Alex Jones' Sandy Hook bullshit comes to mind, as does FOX election conspiracies, which falls apart the minute they are sued). It corrupts society at large. That's why I started https://rational.app
In fact, I think that safety nets and UBI and 30-hour overtime laws will help men and women opt out of the rat race, and spend more time with their kids. The increased health, IQ points and better morals / education of the children will actually provide greater monetary returns for society (even though for me they are ends in themselves). For example, the moratorium on evictions may have enabled a richer society than one where millions of people are housing-insecure.
I think that UBI and gift economies (like science, open source and wikipedia) are far healthier than "private ownership" of social capital like audiences, (Twitter followers), distribution (news stations, etc.) or infrastructure. Gift economies become possible when people have their maslow's needs met and the anxiety is gone, so they can freely associate with projects they like, instead of being mercenaries 40-60 hours a week to survive. In these gift economies, there are so many small contributions that peer review is instituted (in science, open source, wikipedia, etc.) which actually increases the quality of what is published far better than competition, because most audience members are not informed enough (and will soon be bamboozled by AI bots and fake articles on a scale heretofore unseen, in the current capitalist system).
That's why I believe in building decentralized solutions, like solar panels, mesh networks, open source social networks, and smart contracts. I want a world where people are healthier, safer, and more moral. Sadly, the corporations and governments collude to keep the individuals distracted and at each other's throats (glance at https://magarshak.com/blog)
There is a lot said on both sides (eg several women sued Cosby for calling them liars in 2014). It seems the biggest actual clear admission of sexual assault was from a leaked deposition where he described how he would give Quaaludes in the 60s and 70s to women he met in clubs and subsequently slept with. I looked up the drug on Wikipedia:
Methaqualone became increasingly popular as a recreational drug and club drug in the late 1960s and 1970s, known variously as "ludes" or "disco biscuits"[citation needed] due to its widespread use during the popularity of disco in the 1970s, or "sopers" (also "soaps") in the United States and Canada, and "mandrakes" and "mandies" in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. The substance was sold both as a free base and as a salt (hydrochloride). This use means the drug is controlled in most countries, and is so under Schedule II of the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances.
So if this drug was “in widespread recreational use” in that period, I would imagine this was a widespread systemic problem, and not just limited to Cosby.
So once again, we as a society are distracted and made to think one specific guy is the problem, where actually the entire liberal society got permeated with this kind of stuff, fueled by the exact sort of profit seeking industry I am talking about: drug sales, in this case, rather than rap songs. I am not saying for the government to get involved and carry on a violent and useless drug war on the supply. I am talking about demand-side education like the “just say no to Drugs” by Nancy Reagan, but more importantly — individual attention and relationships with kids, teenagers and young adults, by their parents, teachers, coaches, clergy, whoever. Don’t let the kids slip through the cracks and become loners / outcasts. That is how they turn to these drugs and then this gets cynically exported by CAPITALIST MEDIA to all the others. I am not being hyperbolic, look:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/
Even today, how many times do we investigate allegations of rape on campus, and enact yes means yes and affirmative opt in policies, while doing precious little about the upstream culture of ALCOHOL FUELED PARTIES on campus? These teenagers are below legal drinking age — but besides that, the very idea that college is like an expensive year cruise for partying and experimentation, and coming of age, is behind many of the activities. The “girls gone wild” and “spring break” videos exploit this at the extremes, but we KNOW about the parties even today, yet we focus downstream only, and catch isolated cases.
Hookup culture and casual dating has replaced “going steady”, engagement and marriage. Out of wedlock births have skyrocketed. Divorce rates and opiates and antidepressants have skyrocketed. You can listen to any person, doesn’t have to be Cosby. But what Cosby has admitted to was widespread in society (drug use, alcohol etc) so shouldn’t we as a society look at the widespread problem, instead of patting ourselves on the back that we removed “all the rapists” from the pool?
It is like the gun debate … there are lots of guns in the country, most of the time the people shot and the people doing the shooting are drunk, but we as a society are hung up on individual cases after the fact or “a good guy with a gun an stop a bad guy with a gun”. We don’t connect the dots. The NHS was ordered to STOP doing research into guns and alcohol as an epidemiological or health issue.
Indeed, the past 30 years has seen a consistent expansion of rights and autonomy and relaxation of social rules, and happiness has been declining pretty consistently the whole time: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/22/americans...
It's also the case that happiness among women has been declining since 1970: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w14969/w149.....
One supposes it's easier to be happy as a conservative woman in 2022 given that identifying as such likely means you're sanguine about Roe --- which is a point even the IFS article makes.
Also, it's not an isolated finding. The finding that conservatives are happier is consistently replicated (and long before 2022).
It uses data from a survey commissioned by the Mormon church and does not account for any confounding factors.
Yougov is a surveys for hire company.
So, yeah, it’s a survey run by the Mormon church.
But, more importantly, the conclusions drawn from it by IFS are simply not academically rigorous.
Unlike the sibling comment here, I'm not trying to disqualify the underlying survey, just to point out that it's framing in the article you cited is heavily motivated; countervailing results or analysis presumably would not be allowed to run on the IFS website.
IFS is "heavily motivated" compared to who exactly? Would New America or whoever NPR and the NYT turn to for analysis ever run with a similar story? The notion that increased autonomy and reduced social restriction is an unalloyed good is almost axiomatic among the folks who run every mainstream intellectual institution that isn't expressly conservative. It's the closest a lot of these folks have to a religion. They're highly motivated not to publish contrary evidence.
For what it's worth, most of my conservative friends would strongly disagree with you about the importance of individual autonomy!
If you are a woman in a country that is increasingly oppressing women, it seems it goes without saying that the women most at peace with that state of affairs are the women supportive of that oppression. I'm sure this is as true of the USA as it is of Iran.
[edit to add] One can be conservative in a liberal environment, but to be liberal in a conservative place such as Iran has dire consequences. The only people being imposed on are the ones not free to live to their choosing, so there is no equivalent to forcing upon a conservative in the way conservative laws force upon non-conservatives (that I am aware of)
In reality, most people don't know what choices will make them happy. How could they? And even if they did, they wouldn't know how to get from Point A to Point B, or have the willpower and discipline to stick to it. They need society to develop generational knowledge about those things, socialize children and young people to understand that learning, and socially reinforce good choices. And frankly liberals know that because in other respects, they support societal intervention to protect people from bad choices and help them make good ones. They just have this huge blind spot. The act like the young adult who needs society to protect them from predatory lenders doesn’t need protection from people who might exploit them in other ways. Or that the person who needs education and social pressure when it comes to sugary soft drinks doesn’t need it when it comes to far more impactful decisions about how to live.
And that's before we get to externalities. That's another concept liberals understand but pretend has no application to social norms and behaviors. As if divorce or drug use only affect the individual and not people around them.
Additionally, lots of things have been happening in the last 30 years. The erosion of reproductive rights has been a slow process happening since right after Roe. Income inequality has been rising. Etc.
If you look at another proxy for privilege, education, the trend runs in the opposite direction. Only 31% of women with only a high school education say feminism has helped them, versus 55% of those with a college education: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/07/07/a-centu...
The alternative read of the data, which I suspect is more accurate, is that increased rights and autonomy disproportionately benefits high status women (e.g. pursuing interesting careers, etc). Lower status women, meanwhile, disproportionately suffer the burdens (decreased pressure for men to make commitments and support families).
Pew surveys are much more sophisticated and do differentiate between some of those finer points that you mentioned.
Also, conservative women being happy is not surprising. This is because happiness breeds conservatism. Why? Because you're happy, and you want to keep that status quo. If you were unhappy, you'd want to change things to what you're happy with. People may overlook this, because they typically use the terms conservative and liberal as historical egos, rather than their root meanings.
You can blame technology to a degree, but even then technology probably just serves to amplify existing negative trends. Kids today are far more likely than in the past to move around and have divorced parents. They’re less likely to live in inter-generational households. They’re less likely to have a job or go to church or interact with society at large in meaningful ways.
Meanwhile what fills that vacuum of civil society is other children, through age-segregated schooling and, these days, social media. That strikes me as a huge problem, because children are antisocial semi-humans without fully developed brains. Having children spend most of their time around other children, without strong socializing forces, is a perverse arrangement.
I've been so thankful that at my high school there was a great open lunch, & quite a few areas where different school grades mixed together. I got access to a diverse range of smart & creative folk.
This is just an additional two grades surrounded by the same kids and teachers.
Luckily for me, my highschool has no sixth-form. Therefore I went to a dedicated sixth-form college. A large college of 2000 students over two year groups.
I really enjoyed this time. I shedded all associations except for my closest friends and made new friend circles. It refined my character. And when I started university, the whole process was much easier.
It is also cruel to do the opposite, perhaps more cruel.
Honestly, I think "reinvention" is overvalued/oversold in contemporary culture, and I'd reckon most kids (and adults) would be better served by maintaining their existing friendships and social patterns instead of forcing a change for change's sake.
Globally everybody is getting less than what media (and social media) peomised them, but we have to live long enough to understand the destruction it causes in our own lives.
> "The Youth Risk Behavior Survey was given to 17,000 adolescents at high schools across the United States in the fall of 2021. The survey is conducted every two years, and the rates of mental health problems have gone up with every report since 2011, Dr. Ethier said."
Is this really enough data to come to any solid conclusions? What's the seasonal spread, for example, do you get big differences if you run the survey in June or July? What's the socioeconomic spread on the data? Are there major differences in reporting between boys and girls? Can this be accepted as a real trend with any confidence? I just don't know about this stuff anymore.
Tech companies with market caps that dwarf the largest pharma companies would like you to think "no."
IIRC, these mental health trend-lines started to rapidly get worse at almost exactly the same time that smartphones and social media started to take off.
I doubt it. The problem with this approach is that in general you won't have the answers you want/need. So in the end you'll leave with more questions than answers, and that is not a great feeling.
And even if you did had all the answers, most people don't have the time to fully understand them.
Besides that, I don't think that 'medical health news' have anything special. This should apply to all subjects.
I've been getting to see through my niece how much the 2 years hurt her social development. She's just a kindergartner. so she can probably still recover, but I imagine it's much harder for kids who missed out on their early teens and learning to cope with problems without being in a comfortable place/without a parent one door away.
I feel the same way but at this point it isn't suffering for me. I open nyt and see something pharma/mental health/etc related and assume it's someone advocating some lifestyle that benefits the pharma industry
I mean, this is sort of our economic system: manipulating people into being more profitable. It makes zero sense to me why some people decide to selectively trust based off of whatever is trending in political discourse. Most strangers who want to reach you want to sell you something. Maybe some people have trouble accepting that we live in an actual dystopia? Idk
Edit, relevant article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/02/13/mental-...
Wow. Is this out of the study, females, or LGBTQ?
“We need to talk about what’s happening with teenage boys that might be leading them to perpetrate sexual violence.”
Are they all teen boys, or could it be that there older predators at play here?
Edit: why disagree without any response? These are legitimate questions. Are we not curious hackers here?
Because in the full paragraph, it's very clear what was intended:
> The findings, based on surveys given to teenagers across the country, also showed high levels of violence, depression and suicidal thoughts among lesbian, gay and bisexual youth. More than one in five of these students reported attempting suicide in the year before the survey, the agency found.
On the other hand:
> > “We need to talk about what’s happening with teenage boys that might be leading them to perpetrate sexual violence.”
> Are they all teen boys, or could it be that there older predators at play here?
I actually think that's a valid question that's left unaddressed by the article, especially given that as I usually see the data presented, threats of this kind of thing, for kids and adolescents, overwhelmingly comes from relatives or trusted adults—if that's becoming less-true even as rates rise, that's a pretty big deal. Buuuuut I can see why readers would just DV your whole post, given the two things you chose to call out and that one of them is already answered by the article, such that it looks like you're trying to cherry-pick with a bit of an edgy slant.
If anything maybe these statistics are so alarming is because we as a society didn’t categorize abuse as abuse until recently. Consider that raping one’s wife was legal until recently. Beating children was considered normal until a generation or so ago. Trying to force gay people to convert to straight was the medically condoned treatment. All sorts of abhorrent behaviors were normalized and people simply denied the harm it was causing.
I suppose the question is should we call any painful learning experience 'a trauma'?
I actually woke up to that one just recently. Turns out in WA lack of verbal consent from your wife could leave one with up to 5 years in prison if your relationship goes haywire and the wife turns vengeful for whatever reasons (which is not uncommon). Getting to know that - have fun having sex if you are even slightly insecure about your relationship.
From reading that law even obtaining a written advance consent from your own wife before each intercourse won't guarantee you won't land in prison because any consent is revocable at any moment by exhibiting vague elusive behavior. And even if there's no evidence apart from the partner's word, just the chance of getting on trial does not sound fun at all.
That's not to mention that any consent is null while under alcohol influence. So better not to have sex when your partner is drunk (regardless if you're drunk too) even if you've been married for many years.
https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/yrbs_data_summary...
Click "Download Report." This specific article is about Page 59 to 61 (both PDF pages and embedded page numbers) for "Feelings of Sadness or Hopelessness" and pages 63 to 66 for "Seriously Considered Attempting Suicide."
TL;DR: Between 2011 and 2021 -- "Feelings of Sadness or Hopelessness" has increased for males 8%, and 21% for females. The "Seriously Considered Attempting Suicide" has increased 1% for males and 11% for females. "Make a suicide plan" has increased 1% for males, and 9% for females.
PS - The CDC uses the terms "males" and "females" in the linked report, which is what I am reproducing here rather than altering the language which could add confusion or inaccuracy.
No.
> The survey did not ask students about reasons for their feelings of sadness or thoughts of harming themselves.
https://health.usnews.com/health-care/patient-advice/article...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/girls-women-and-well...
Persistent sadness and hopelessness is not the kind of thing that you'll get a useful answer for when you directly ask why they feel that way.
That said, the article mentions several factors that are contributing to the increase in sadness and violence among teenage girls in the United States. Some of the root causes mentioned in the article include traumatic experiences, including sexual violence; interpersonal stress from school, peers and home; a rise in violent behavior, particularly targeting girls; and stigma and violence toward LGBTQ+ teenagers
have a listen.
Depression can lead to addiction which can directly impact communicable diseases (a subset of disease in general), or hereditary disease onset (another subset of diseases in general).
Edit to add the CDC mission statement:
CDC works 24/7 to protect America from health, safety and security threats, both foreign and in the U.S. Whether diseases start at home or abroad, are chronic or acute, curable or preventable, human error or deliberate attack, CDC fights disease and supports communities and citizens to do the same.
CDC increases the health security of our nation. As the nation’s health protection agency, CDC saves lives and protects people from health threats. To accomplish our mission, CDC conducts critical science and provides health information that protects our nation against expensive and dangerous health threats, and responds when these arise.
Edit again to add: I think 10,600 employees can keep a few balls in the air. You don't need many to undertake one survey. https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/02/29/106...
When I drive by Buford Highway at 3 AM, the CDC is a total ghost town. I'm sure they have on-call personnel for infrequent, high-priority events and a skeleton crew for passaging cells on schedule. It's not like they're all hanging out down the block at the Pho 24 or Waffle House thinking about diseases during their midnight break, though. These are cushy office jobs.
That said, one of the directors lives in my building. Total night owl. So maybe the 24/7 part is true in spirit.
[1] - At least part of the duties involve the embassy. So presumably watching out for US citizens in Angola.
Local therapy offerings are a joke with most of my local options being religious driven programs/therapists. Insurance coverage of mental health issues even on my work based insurance is non-existent. I don't see this problem going away any time soon.
"But about 57 percent of girls and 69 percent of gay, lesbian or bisexual teenagers reported feeling sadness every day for at least two weeks during the previous year."
At least two weeks of sadness per year? That's a very low threshold.
The long term teen suicide trend is up, since the early 2000s.[2] The last two years don't show a huge variation from the trend.
[1] https://archive.is/u2wuF
[2] https://www.healthline.com/health-news/teen-suicide-rate-spi...
Likely because the ability to do so had gone down (can't go somewhere, parents are home), not because they're any less depressed.
CDC report on overall population. [1] Provisional data from CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics indicate that both the number and the rate of suicides in the United States increased 4 percent from 2020 to 2021, after two consecutive years of decline in 2019 and 2020. The rate of suicides per 100,000 increased from 13.5 in 2020 to 14.0 in 2021, which is still lower than the modern peak of 14.2 in 2018.
CDC report on teenage girls. [2] indicated that young females had both higher and increasing rates of ED visits for suicide attempts compared with males (8). However, the findings from this study suggest more severe distress among young females than has been identified in previous reports during the pandemic
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7024e1.htm
[1]
[1] https://www.axios.com/2023/02/13/teen-girls-sadness-violence...People just developed new ways to kill themselves.
>"Drug overdose deaths have risen fivefold over the past 2 decades. In 2021, 106,699 deaths occurred, resulting in an age-adjusted rate of 32.4 per 100,000 standard population. From 2020 through 2021, the rate for males increased from 39.5 to 45.1, and the rate for females increased from 17.1 to 19.6. In both 2020 and 2021, adults aged 35–44 had the highest rate among people aged 15 and over. Between 2020 and 2021, the largest percentage increase in rates occurred among those aged 65 and over (28%). In both 2020 and 2021, rates were highest for non-Hispanic AIAN people; however, the greatest percentage increase in rates from 2020 to 2021 occurred for non-Hispanic NHOPI people.
The rates of drug overdose deaths involving different types of opioids and stimulants also increased from 2020 to 2021. Increases in rates occurred for drug overdose deaths involving psychostimulants with abuse potential (from 7.5 to 10.0), synthetic opioids other than methadone (17.8 to 21.8), and cocaine (6.0 to 7.3). Rates were similar for drug overdose deaths involving natural and semisynthetic opioids, as well as deaths involving methadone. Of the drugs examined, only drug overdose deaths involving heroin had a lower rate in 2021 than in 2020 (2.8 and 4.1, respectively).
Obviously life is much "easier" today from the perspective of material conditions, but why assume that this is a "good" thing?
Or maybe I'm just a delusional Teddy K fanboy who's sick of typing on a computer all day, day after day, year after year.
Wander a graveyard from the 1800s and see how many very young children are listed on the headstones below their parents. How do we account for "a bunch of your kids are likely to die" in this metric?
It's easy to look with rose-hued glasses at the past and imagine an idylic pastoral lifestyle. The reality was quite a bit more complicated.
But that's not the question. The question is do those things make for greater human thriving and fulfillment? Increasing things that people find pleasurable does not necessarily have this effect. As a simple and extreme example, consider heroin.
I read a lot of old stuff, with a focus on anything I can find from regular people. I used to think like you do. I'm much less convinced nowadays that we've really made people's lives better in a meaningful, non-material way, excepting a very few examples that GP already alluded to (e.g., reduction in infant mortality, which accounts for virtually the entire life expectancy increase since 1850.)
The scientists and engineers that work insane hours at SpaceX are probably looking for something like that.
But in the past, for most people, life was merely a struggle to survive, that they lost sooner rather than later.
It's really hard to say what's "better" in any sort of objective and quantifiable way; but it seems to me that by making the basics of life very easy we've sort of lost something along the way.
After all, playing a game that's so easy that it doesn't provide any challenge isn't much fun either, right?
No, it doesn't, this is just one of those banal transcendental platitudes that gets repeated enough to where it sounds like it's some sort of objective truth. Like the one about how "life only has meaning because it is short and ephemeral". By that logic an aborted fetus has had the richest life of all.
Life's meaning is ultimately in the eyes of the beholder. We all derive meaning differently, there is no universal solvent.
There is a very good reason why people want to go from poor countries to rich and not the other way around. Poverty is not fun.
Happiness has been going up worldwide but it has been dropping in the US since 2010. Which might be a part of this post.
There is Human Development Index (HDI) that is used to compare countries. It is based on life expectancy, education, and income. By those measures, there has been a huge increase in the last two centuries. And a big increase in many countries in last 50 years. But that more covers physical not emotional needs.
Even this much is not clear. The economist Robert Gordon has argued, to my mind pretty persuasively, that medicine (i.e. doctors, hospitals, routine checkups) has received undue credit for improvements in health between 1870-1970 that are actually attributable to improved sanitation, diet, vaccination, etc.
> Analysis of the mid-Victorian period in the U.K. reveals that life expectancy at age 5 was as good or better than exists today, and the incidence of degenerative disease was 10% of ours.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672390/
Medical advances for adults since 1870 have mostly done little besides hold the line on keeping us alive through the effects of increased pollution, worse diets, and lower physical activity.
This is really, really disturbing when you think about how much of GDP is dedicated to health care.
But on the topic of people being better off I would also disagree strongly: the wealthy were the wealthy, and still poorer today in everyway that matters. The King of France might've notionally had an army, but all his money in the world couldn't buy the inspiration, creativity or organizational skill which made indoor plumbing possible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike
I have yet to see a national map of every area where the water isn't safe to drink, but I'd recommend checking cities in your area often and checking any place you plan on visiting because it rarely gets a lot of attention. I expect things to get even worse once we get federally enforced standards and rules for PFAS contamination.
Here are some recent examples:
https://www.25newsnow.com/2022/11/21/boil-order-large-portio...
https://calmatters.org/newsletters/whatmatters/2022/07/calif...
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/water-boil-order-issued-...
https://www.newsweek.com/florida-city-issues-boil-water-warn...
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/michigan/articles/20...
https://people.com/human-interest/boil-water-notice-lifted-i...
https://cdphe.colorado.gov/press-release/town-of-superior-is...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/21/lead-contami...
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/environment/ct-illinois-...
https://www.mynbc5.com/article/new-hampshire-town-forced-to-...
There is something to your comment of life being easier(and not necessarily being a good thing). Fruits and vegetables often grow the best harvests when they are challenged(wind, rain, etc...) and I think this is also reflective of the human condition. I'm not saying go to war tomorrow so you can experience hardship, but there are ways to make life more challenging so that when true challenges arise, one can be a little stronger. I think we are losing some of this grit today.
It would be helpful to be specific about what challenging behavior encourages grit or not. e.g. Going to the DMV does not improve my patience or make me a better person. To your point: What should we make challenging? Or better yet, how can we scale challenges to encourage grit?
Humans have limited energy and time resources to expend on being alive. We divert the energy spent on challenging things that don't matter to high-profile items, not necessarily better problems.
Conversely, what about the damages of going through too much challenge that you don't have the ability to meet? Does it always turn out OK after you've failed beyond belief? Is the ability to overcome challenges (beyond your basic day to day) even matter? SOME people might be able to improve the world by becoming resilient to challenge but MOST people will not affect the world in any way meaningfully in the long-term (even if they are a part of a team that does).
Grit is developed in part by hearing that little voice in your head that says “I don’t feel like doing this” and then going out and doing that thing. I wouldn’t necessarily expect others to lay out a curriculum for you to develop these types of things. It could be going for a mile run or helping a coworker on a Friday afternoon, it doesn’t have to be going on a 25 mile run every other day.
While improving the world could be an end result, the main driver is probably just to have a more manageable existence for oneself.
Lastly, it doesn’t always turn out okay, and knowing how to deal with that needs to be part of the toolbox.
Now I hate the word grit haha
Averages are what make comparisons hard - there is a lot of variation within the averages. Truckers in the U.S., for example, were way better off in 1970 than they are today (in relative terms). But an average factory worker in China was way worse off.
Maybe it was more boring, not sure, but at least all the stupid stuff I did at the time wasn't documented on the internet. I don't know how I'd handle that.
I recommend Laslett's "The World We Have Lost" (or its second edition, "The World We Have Lost Further Explored"), for a glimpse of life a mere 200 years ago. You'll need to pay close attention and read between the lines, though.
At the same time, death to many of us has become little more than an abstract concept, something relegated mostly to the very old. With less suffering and death, we have less to ground us in an inescapable urgency about life, or a sense of immediate and pressing purpose. I'm convinced if it weren't for penicillin and vaccines, people would generally take life more seriously; there'd also be a lot more religious feeling, fervor, and searching.
Stuff like the internet is what I would call a mixed bag. I think we really underestimate how incredible it is to be able to look up how to do anything, fix anything, learn anything pretty much in a few clicks. Yet the para-social stuff is the new cigarettes. Pro-Ana and Incel communities being rather extreme examples of this where men and women are getting severely depressed over 5 pounds or a few millimeters of chin where they proceed to talk eachother into starving to death or getting limb lengthening surgery and well if they’re doing it you have to do it too if you want to keep up…
Post agriculture I suppose it is pretty easy to argue that times were tougher in the past (medieval serfs got more days off and did way less work than we do today, but I'll concede that I'd rather my kids be alive and put in 40 hr/week).
Pre agriculture, which is the majority of human history? That's where things get interesting. People in hunter gatherer tribes lived long lives (assuming they survived childhood), didn't suffer from most of the things we need modern medicine and sanitation for (because those things are a result of agriculture itself), and "worked" about 30 hours per week if we use modern hunter gatherers like the !kung as proxies, and their "work" was doing things we do for relaxation these days like hunting, gathering, and foraging.
Unfortunately, there's no going back, so you better make sure you've got yourself a good keyboard.
There is no gun violence in the US. There is violent crime. There is murder. They are different things.
It's pretty clear we have a gun problem and for a long time.
https://www.brookings.edu/2022/04/21/mapping-gun-violence-a-...
Edit: Also, gun violence isn't rampant in the US? Compared to what? Certainly rampant compared to any peer society.
https://www.insider.com/number-of-mass-shootingsin-america-t...
> In sum, it’s reasonable to start with skepticism of my claim (with Jean Twenge) that there is an epidemic of mental illness that began around 2012, and that is related in large part to the transition to phone-based childhoods, with a special emphasis on social media. It makes sense to embrace as a null hypothesis the skeptics’ view that there is nothing to see here, just another moral panic, and the kids are fine. I am in full agreement that the burden of proof falls on me.
The DSM-5 had several changes in diagnosis that could explain the sharp rise in his graphs. That we simply got a view of how bad our society’s mental health is, rather than it increasing at a dramatically higher rate than pre-2012.
Diagnosis around women’s mental health has also become much better in recent years. The amount of gaslighting around disorders and “hysteria” in women historically is troubling and completely unethical.
I find Gabor Mate’s work much more enlightening in understanding why mental health is such an issue in the modern world. I highly recommend his books if you are curious.
Gabor’s definition of addiction is that it is a coping mechanism to seek relief from pain, often with negative consequences. Therefore social media does not explain the pain. It’s an effect not a cause, despite how it can contribute to feelings of loneliness and inadequacy.
Instead it is worth understanding how our youth are raised, and the trauma their parents carry onto them despite their best intentions and effort.
Offering one's self up to social media can allow you to mechanistically escape pain, but it also does damage at the same time.
The more you offer yourself up to social media, you are giving away a chunk of your mental health to be liked and adored by instagram.
How could anyone own their mental health, when you can dump your hopes and dreams into the void anytime you want, to offer yourself up in hopes of relief.
Gabor only tells a quarter of the story.
Anger is an irritation of diverting from expectations.
Taking into account my friends/acquaintances that I'm familiar with their kids, so a sample of probably about 25ish teen girls. There is a big correlation of social media/cell phone access and issues.
Bullying, exposed to adult content, comparing yourself to others, drama, all have one consistent source, social media and cell phone apps. Personally, I don't allow social media, and my kids don't have cell phone access. They're in a very tiny minority compared to their peers. To me the benefits of this far outweigh any drawbacks.
I'm not saying that bullying doesn't happen outside social media, or anything like that, however, there definitely seems to be a heavy correlation between cell phone use and general teen angst. My girls, a small sample of two, seem to not have the same issues their peers have.
I strongly recommend evaluating the use of cell phones with your children for their own mental and emotional well-being. It has actually made me use social media a lot less because of it.
I think both have a purpose and a place. However it's inherently obvious that things that are only short term satisfaction and the most dangerous, because you keep repeating the cycle.
For example liking memes is a short burst, a second later they are no longer relevant. For others it's shopping. You get a mini-high, but a few moments later that's gone. A lot of people seem to just keep pressing the button, get a droplet of happiness and press the button more time. That becomes a vicious cycle.
Essentially if your actions today are identical to tomorrow and nothing has changed, you are stuck in a loop. I'm not trying to argue that everyone needs to be hyper-productive all the time. What I'm talking about is if all your hobbies are consumption, you might be stuck.
D&D, which I play is different because you are doing it in a social setting. It's more like socializing with an excuse and a purpose, you get to exercise your creativity, imagination, you are actively using your mind. Passing things like watching youtube all day or drinking don't do that.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7014006/
How is this working out? I assume your kids must have healthy social lives and don't feel left out, otherwise you'd have reconsidered. My kids will get to device-using age someday and I'd love to do something similar with mine. But am somewhat amazed that parents can enforce this even at the teenager stage.
They also have access to Youtube using my old phone. However, I have very clear rules about Youtube, which I can share if someone is curious. Finally, they have Amazon tablets with parental settings for their age group, and pretty much everything disabled except for books and kid apps.
I'm explaining all of this so people can understand that they have access to some electronics. Basically, I have covered some electronic needs that they have like music, watching an occasional video, play video games.
One of the advantages is by having specific devices for specific things I know what they are doing without having to watch over them.
Youtube is the biggest exposure my kids have. I have my account logged in, so I can see what they watch, they know this. With no adult settings. Moreover, there is only one time they are allowed to watch Youtube it's an hour and all 4 of them take turns. This has actually created something I didn't expect, it forces them to find common videos they can all enjoy, or they just won't watch at specific days that the videos are "boring".
If I look at the history and find a problematic video I will set expectations, reminders and sometimes I outright block certain channels. What's interesting is now that they have been doing this for a few years they monitor themselves. I hear them say "we can't watch that, find a different video".
To answer the other part of the question of do they "healthy social lives". They do. I actually thing social media gives you a false sense of socializing. "Look at all the friends / likes I have". Instead, my kids actually talk to other kids or play. My oldest is more into hang out, draw, listen to music kind of thing. Overall, my wife is really social by nature, she has what I call people magic, so my kids have learned to emulate that. We coincidentally moved to a new house this year, within a week they had established multiple friends and befriended the entire neighborhood.
Boredom helps, we all try to avoid it like the plague, but being bored allows you to become more creative. My kids go outside more, it helps that I have 4 because they can play with each other if no one else is around.
I don't want to pretend my kids are perfect, and I am an amazing dad. They have faults, so do I, a lot of them. To me the key is setting clear expectations and explaining the why. The joke in my house is they will probably learn how to drive before they have a cellphone. Honestly that might happen.
The main gist is adult or unknown content is not OK. Video game, creative (draw, paint etc), educational videos are fine.
Of course, I have had to refine these rules as things came up.
No TikTok videos on Youtube (the inappropriate to OK videos ratio is way to hit)
No funny prank videos (because most of them are people being mean to others)
No scarry videos unless it's kid Halloween videos and all the kids are OK with watching it (remember they share one screen and take turns on deciding)
Funny animal videos are fine.
Music videos are fine if we have watched it already with them, if they are not sure add "lyrics" to the end of the song and watch the lyric version or ask us (they just opt for lyrics to avoid having to ask/waiting)
If someone uses naughty words once it can be ignored, if they do it a lot especially if the 6-year-old is watching it's an auto change and the youtuber to be avoided (We allow our kids to curse in their rooms if they wish, but not at each other, in public, school or people that might have a problem with it, like their grandparents)
No videos from random channels about boyfriend/girlfriend drama, unknown origin animations about love stories (ratio of inappropriate language, innuendo, sexism, misogyny, abuse is too high). Again, they can ask if they are not sure.
I think that's pretty much it. Every few days, mainly when I watch a youtube video (probably every 2-3 days) I will look at the history. If I find something borderline I will watch the video briefly, if there is a problem, I will explain what it was, if it turns out it was an OK video I will move on.
If I find problematic youtubers I will block them, this is rare, but it has happened. I also see what the Youtube algo suggests, if I see a suggestion that seems iffy, I will mark it as not interested so my kids won't be drawn to it. As time has progressed their feed has gotten cleaner, and they understand what they can and cannot watch better.
Oh, and another thing I have Youtube Premium to avoid ads, because for some reason Google allows some really weird advertisements for children at times. I basically replaced my Spotify subscription for this, and started listening to Google music.
Our oldest Teen would be happy, respectful involved in the family. Be allowed back on social media within a few days. She was rude, disrespectful depressed, and just sat in bed all day. We would take it away within a couple of days she was back to her old happy self.
Repeat this for several years. The entire time she insisted, I did not affect her.
As an adult now she stays off of it, and strongly discourages her sisters from using social media and regrets being on it.
Social media is a convenient scapegoat. The media hates it with a passion since it completely disrupted their business model. And it allows people to completely ignore the fact that teenagers are increasingly under more and more stress with high stake testing, an increasingly competitive college admission process and increasingly grim prospects for economic mobility and long term environmental sustainability. But let's ignore all that and blame the "evil screens" and social media.
> comparing yourself to others, drama, all have one consistent source, social media and cell phone apps.
In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds." [0] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5 being obese, not just overweight. And it has more than tripled since the 70's [1]. I have to wonder if it's related. A lot of teenagers are bombarded with images of perfectly healthy bodies that, quite simply, won't match what they see in the mirror.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obe...