I always wonder when an "epidemic" gets reported if things really have changed or if we just recognize it better. When I grew up, we had a lot of kids (including myself) with problems like depression or not fitting in in other ways. Back then they were just labeled as "slow", "stupid" or "difficult". Nobody thought about mental illness or ways for addressing these issues.
Actually glad you said that. One of my recent shower thoughts that I was sure no one would understand. I distinctly remember growing up, people being "slow" or "different" or "<something now consider offensive>". Gender identity and mental health issues have been around forever, they're just now actually getting brought to the forefront.
Also it used to be the case that beating your own kids was normal. Of course now we got studies about how that screws kids up, but it was ubiquitous in my generation. And now that we can identify that children can be harmed from physical violence, we actually have ways to diagnose that sort of thing in teenagers. I wonder what our baseline trauma is supposed to be!
And it's such a good thing that we're finally paying attention to this stuff and treating it (insert graph of left-handedness over time). But then everyone is out here trying to figure out what must be wrong with the world today when Boomers and Gen X are traumatized as hell and full of undiagnosed mental illness. But they grew up in a culture where unless it was life-debilitating or presented in exactly the stereotypical manner it was ignored and pushed down.
Conversely, were over-diagnosing and now everyone is ill.
Which necessarily follows because the closer you look the fewer people are "normal". In fact I'd go so far as to posit that everyone is aberrant, to nobody's surprise.
And of course this is all derivated from a basis of largely qualitative soft-science which had ought be treated as an art than it is a science, however there are pressures which force both practitioners and researchers to justify it as a science.
I'm sure there's some "law of self-awareness" as well. The closest analogy I have is the January Effect which describes an even in the market, a pattern of sell-off in the later year to mark a loss, and subsequent repurchase in January. Upon this pattern being disclosed, the market adapted strategies to exploit it which ultimately resulted in a complete silencing of the effect. In a sense more applicable to this, being diagnosed with some mental illness can also be leveraged to gain favor, I mean I can get a prescription for pharmaceutical grade amphetamines for fidgeting for instance; or excuse my bad behavior with some other diagnosis.
My position is that it's all very unclear. I'm lazy and don't care to dig it up but there was a study from the UK that observed the measurable effects from school based, non-individual interventions and it found their effects to be significantly detrimental for some students - to the extent that they negated the aggregate benefits - which I think supports this position because treatment can exacerbate things. And that's without mentioning pharmacological interventions which are... Interesting.
Okay so to summarize, casual dismissal of an entire field of medicine, insinuation that patients are faking mental illness to "look cool," justify their selfish behaviors, or get access to drugs, and that interventions for severe symptoms of mental illness either don't work or make things worse.
It really does feel like I was bred in a lab to exist as the counterexample for all this. I was diagnosed with ADHD in middle school and my parents thought exactly as you did and refused treatment. For a long time I held this as a point of pride and thought of my parents as saving me from those cruel teachers that just wanted to keep me down, any why would I question them? I have no other frame of reference and was marked "different" by my teachers and other kids so all of my struggles were just framed in terms of that. And so it went with my anxiety and depression, I didn't have an illness, I was a worrier that just needed to calm down. I didn't have depression I was lazy, angsty, and logical -- that's why I didn't get out of bed all day, thought everything sucked and existence was pain, and so numb I could give Spock a run for his money.
Fast forward to college where I was getting my annual checkup and flu shot and I got my first ever mental health questionnaire. I answered honestly because at the time I genuinely thought that my experience wasn't unusual -- "Doesn't everyone think about killing themselves all the time?" I got referred to a therapist and eventually a psychiatrist for confirmation (because teaching hospital) who both didn't even take an hour to be clock me with all three. I got put on an antidepressant, an anti-anxiety, and a stimulant over the course of about a year and a half and I felt something and then cried for the first time since sixth grade, realized what not having anxiety feels like, and what life is like when you're not constantly in pain from under-stimulation.
I just can't bring myself to think it's all quack science when I was so thoroughly dressed down by these two guys so fast and who took a little less than two years to get them all sorted. It was surreal when the psychiatrist just described my whole life experience without even missing a beat. Life changing undersells it so much and it came out of literally nowhere for me.
I'm sure this was happening in the sense that you can find any brand of niche crazy if you go looking for it but the "teens getting 'Tourette's'" was a bigger thing and absolutely fascinating. Writing it off as just kids faking it for attention you miss the really cool phenomenon that you can pick up tics like like any other accent's quirks. And just like accents unlearning it is an annoyingly hard process once those brain pathways form.
So they didn't have Tourette's and they weren't faking it, but a seriously cool third thing. Monkey see monkey do is a powerful phenomenon. We just treat it as normal when it happens as part of socialization.
Not fitting in is not a mental illness. And this attitude is behind the prevalence of many mental illnesses today. We've gone from a society that embraced difference to one that claims to embrace difference while mandating sameness. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc, are all toxic for this reason.
Maybe embrace is the wrong word. Rather, it was hard for your left hand to know what your right was doing so to speak. So you could easily separate parts of your life. Maybe you were totally normal but had some weird hobby that you engaged in with a group of people every third Saturday. You could successfully construct alternate personae for different groups. Nowadays, your entire life has to be bared out for everyone, and this means that everyone wants to do the same things.
There seems to be a lot of pressure on the youth today. Growing up I had a lot of unscheduled time but now kids can't play multiple sports due to games, practices, and expectations.
The trends in increased mental illness, suicide and the unraveling social fabric pre-date social media. Bowling Alone was written in 2000. These are mostly economic issues manifesting itself in all sorts of negative social ways.
The definitions, and diagnoses, of mental illnesses have been significantly redefined in the last few decades which is a significant confounding factor that I'm not sure can be corrected for.
No, it's not just "more Haidt", it's a decidedly anti-Haidt article.
the book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science.
Being Nature the calling Haidt out for bupkis part is buried amid a lot of
Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers.
You know how many nerds didn't know they had any sort of issue other than being antisocial and lonely, and then someone made Slashdot aware of Asperger's and suddenly 90% of the site was self-diagnosed?
Feels like 1952 again. When Alan Turing was jailed for homosexuality.
To be generous I would say maybe some people have a disorder and that causes them to state they are non binary, but the implication isn’t the other way.
Similarly a mental disorder may make someone obsessed with levels and coding 80hrs a week!
Adherence to cultural sex stereotypes is a spectrum, isn't it? Within the context mentioned by the other commenter, that's what "non binary" refers to: not behaving in an entirely feminine or masculine manner.
Reification is the false assumption of using something abstract to make an objective classification. My point is in this case the underlying is not abstract, it’s as objective as it gets (your genetic makeup is a fact).
This is as absolutely true as saying elements within the universe are fundementally binary, an atom is either hydrogen or helium (with the exception of atomic aberrations).
The math is the same, 2% of elements within the universe are other than H or He, and 2% of human births have chromosomal aberrations.
To be clearer (and fair to the context): "Pure" intersex is
conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female", stating the prevalence of intersex is about 0.018%
whereas more general chromosomal aberrations that deviate from " unquestionably male " or from " unquestionably female " come in at just under 2% (as I recall).
FWiW I believe there's a bit more to behaviour than pure genetics but it's a hard one to pin down; outside of western society there are many places with a long history for not caring about gender nearly as much as abrahamic westerners seem to; the Bugis, pacific sistergirls, etc.
From a datascience perspective there's a non zero number of actual people in Australia that are born intersex and neither male nor female at birth to warrent a non specific gender entry on passport databases .. as a matter of cold pragmatic fact divorced from any "woke" and|or "culture war" politic posturing.
The "gender binary" itself is just cultural sex stereotyping, so pretty much everyone is "non-binary" in practice. As almost no-one behaves as the caricature of femininity or masculinity that some people have unfortunately come to believe represents women and men.
So it's not really a useful concept at all, and certainly not as an indication of mental disorder.
The disorder itself is not made up, which is clear from my comment where I stated that it's a relatively rare mental illness (therefore acknowledging it's real), but it becomes made up if an individual who doesn't have that disorder pretends to have it in order to appease a group or belong to a group, thinking having that disorder will raise their social clout.
i can't check the original comment right now but i distinctly remember you writing about gender dysphoria being a "made-up mental illness". and as another commenter just pointed out you agreed with that opinion under a different response. besides, what does this have to do with the article's topic?
All this article says is that Haidt's analysis is just correlation, and then cites a single metastudy from 2019, and doesn't go on to explain what Haidt did wrong. This is despite extensive writing from Haidt that deconstructs that specific metastudy.
Only correlation can never explain something. A bomb will tear a building into bricks, but finding bricks every time after a building explodes does not help identify the cause. Suppose it ended up eventually that the causal source was a novel virus epidemic, say N1H1, instead of social media or the post-2008 economic mess: it wouldn’t help much if people stopped using their social media. I don’t support social media usage for other reasons that are easier to quantify and assign causality, including the waste of time, but I understand the severe limitations of correlations and the differences to causality. Medical research has suffered greatly from errors in causality occasionally dismissing partial self-therapies due to observed correlations, whereas the careful delineation of causation is one of the key ingredients of what made physics such a mature science over the centuries. It is of course hard to try causal experiments for understanding the root of epidemics, and in this case any attempts for causality in therapies are also challenging.
Here is a simple experiment. Spend the same amount of time on social media as your average teen for a month, and report your mental health before and after assuming you use it less. 'correlation does not imply causation' has become the most overused lazy argument to dismiss so many problems.
If HN counts as social media, then I'm probably in the ballpark already. But also I was an anxious kid back before the Internet was even really widely available. I guess I was mentally unwell before it was cool.
Seems more plausible to me that young people are just realizing they will be inheriting the consequences of decades of selfish leadership and they are reasonably worried about the future.
The narrative that social media is the cause and not the obvious looming climate change, war and wealth inequality is frustrating.
I don't mean to be glib, but you are in denial. Nuclear war is more likely now than since the early cold war, China is ready to invade Taiwan, climate change is poised to weaken or complete disrupt the Gulf Stream, America is months away from electing an insurrectionist as president, buying a house is a pipe dream for most Americans...
How could you see that as a young person and not feel at least a little hopeless?
I'm being admittedly a little polemical, personally I'm freaked out by the future. But that aside, I'm curious to hear more about your argument. Are you saying worry about the future can't be causing this issue because scary stuff only started recently?
Those are good points. I would have thought that the trend would started around 2015/2016 if global crises were the main cause. There is a small jump in 2016 for 18-25, but, I don't want to read too much into it.
As the other posters have alluded, read some history, and you'll find parallels everywhere. It's serious, but it's often serious. Previous generations managed to buck up and meet the challenge; what changed? Subjective mindset, not objective situation.
Maybe. But also I've become a massive history nerd and I can't name a single period in the modern world without serious objective problems. There were wars and diseases and nasty politics and crises and injustices and environmental catastrophes aplenty. Our current slate is serious business, but not uniquely so.
Based on the evidence available to us, what the little doomscrolling box has done is drive us crazy and actually make it harder for societies to act on these problems.
In the 1960s the teenagers of the day (who are the people who have been in charge for the last 10-20 years) were inheriting the very real threat of global nuclear war, something that those born after about 1980 didn't need to worry about as teenagers, and it's only really the last few years that it's cropped back up again as a possibility, but it's still nowhere near the level of the 60s.
The way in which this topic is discussed is endlessly infuriating because:
While indeed, social media and specifically content algorithms (both in the present where they decide which content people see, and in the future where they may indeed create it entirely) are certainly worthy of scrutiny with regard to many mental illnesses, and the ongoing exploitation of the attention of young people especially by figures such as Andrew Tate are doing demonstrable, objective harm to tons and tons of young kids, and the entire notion that simply by virtue of making an account a child can, by default, access the entire breadth of content available on any of these sites, for zero money, with zero notification of their parents, etc., is certainly one that IMO doesn't get nearly enough time in popular discussions as to how we've simply shotgunned all of this into the faces of kids for decades now, with precious little data about what it does to them and it's only accelerating...
THEN, when that conversation happens, it's to explain of all fucking things, anxiety and depression. Not body image issues, not rampant misogyny in young boys, not the growing slice of the crowd that "fails to launch" and remain stuck with mom and dad long after it's traditional to do so, no, none of those things, just anxiety. Anxiety which is a perfectly normal and understandable thing, IMO, to experience in a period of history that's got, in a non-exhaustive list:
- A biosphere on the brink of collapse, and no one in power taking it seriously
- War in Europe involving multiple international powers and one of the larger nations on the planet, which seems like it could incredibly easily boil over into World War III
- The rise of authoritarian fascist movements in several countries
- The rise of unchangeable super-corporations that run more of our lives than ever with zero oversight
Like, as an adult, who has SEEN some shit, I have to meter my intake of world news to avoid entering a depressive state in which I cannot function. I have already had a vasectomy because this world is not one I want to bring children into, and my wife got her tubes tied, because there is a non-trivial chance that she won't have the ability in a few years to do so and feels similarly. And it's all well and good to say "well the 24 hour news cycle is probably behind that," maybe? But maybe if said news cycle ever had anything but the worst shit you've ever heard of to report, maybe that would be less of a contributing factor?
I dunno, this just sucks. This incurious response by the dominant media of "well it can't be that the world we're leaving them is fucking awful, it's gotta be those pesky iPhones" is so dismissive and shitty.
Yeah, agreed. Was thinking something similar but your comment is better measured and nuanced. Like, "social media is the problem" suggests the way to help young people is get them off their phone. In some ways, yeah, I do think that would help. But the deeper causes are _why_ social media companies are allowed to keep making addictive products with no responsibility for the negative outcomes, as well as _why_ there is so much scary stuff happening with little action being taken to fix it.
I think it's the worst for teenagers and kids, but what about everyone else! The famous quote "comparison is the thief of joy" is attributed to Theodore Roosevelt, and social media is essentially about constantly comparing yourself to others. I have yet to meet a single person who has taken an extended social media break (or given it up altogether) who hasn't reported a substantial improvement in their mental state and wellbeing.
The coupling of social media and smartphones has made parental negligence, laziness, emotional distress, and plain stupidity a hundred times more harmful. That's the gist of it.
Don't know about teenagers, but quite a few people close to me, 50 to 60 yrs old have have gone more than a little mad due to social media. Paranoia, conspiracy, and chronic anxiety. They were all quite sane 10 years ago.
The problem with social media is it is a paralysis engine. It drives the most seemingly credible, brain-wormy and engagement-driving discourse to the top, promoting the most violent, exclusionary and aggressively undertoned rallying cries of trending angst-fueled ideologies. As a consequence, whatever your opinion, identity, or circumstances, you will surely encounter the echo chambers of people who want you dead or removed from society: calculated, memetically selected hatred that sows fear, uncertainty, and doubt in anything more that complete surrender and inaction.
The causality here (and the fact of the matter) is far more complex than it seems though - for example, each person's perception of what is going on is to a large degree a function of their culture and education, and those two attributes tend to get a free pass at least when it comes to oneself or the members of one's ingroups in all such discussions.
Our wonderful, purely well-intentioned politicians could do something about this dire "need for more critical thinking", and yet what do they do to fulfill that need, despite it being literally their responsibility.
For example: these terrible people you are referring to out there....are you sure they are as they seem (where did you learn these facts about their intentions from, etc), and that they are enemy number 1?
I don't agree. As far as I remember somewhat extreme opinions were present in the public discourse (for instance far left positions on university campus, far right ones at the local pub).
Moreover, people who want me dead or removed from society because of my political views are in my immediate social or professional circle, no need for social media to meet them.
> Moreover, people who want me dead or removed from society because of my political views are in my immediate social or professional circle, no need for social media to meet them.
I always see discussions on this topic online immediately start discussing how the content of social media is the driver of the mental health issues (comparison to others, everyone projecting their best selves etc).
My own experiences with social media and phone addiction leads me to believe its not JUST the content, but also (equally, perhaps moreso) the fact that teenagers AND adults with social media and phone addiction are just spending so much of their time absorbed into a screen scrolling and getting quick dopamine hits for hours and hours.
When that is your default that you revert to to distract yourself at almost any point of discomfort, slight boredom, lapse in focus, anxiety or feelings of sadness, all it does is just dampen those feelings momentarily. You live in almost a fugue state where those things just fester as you avoid them instead of learning to cope with them or respond to them in an agentic or healthy manner.
Working to cut out social media, reddit, youtube etc on my phone, leave my phone by our front door while at home, never have my phone in bed, and spend time writing/journaling my thoughts and actually engaging with my feelings of anxiety or depression or stress instead of avoiding them has been by far the most significant improvement on my mental health compared to many other things I've worked out.
This is definitely anecdotal, and its definitely my experience, but after the time i've spent working on these things and with what I see in the teenagers, young people, and friends in my life I feel very strongly about it.
I'm in the same boat as you, and feel equally strongly about it, despite being in a bit of a relapse period at the moment.
"The medium is the message" never stops being relevant. The 'content' of social media is just the 'reward' mechanism for your engagement.
This is the fourth (?) time on HN I've recommended "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman. If you're a reader, I think you might enjoy it. It is both descriptive of its time in the age of Television, and incredibly prescient. It has aged flawlessly, you can draw a straight line from it to our modern, socially mediated world.
... and how they steer the discussion from "social media" to "screen time".
Wikipedia helpfully selected a picture of somebody using an ebook reader as their illustration of what "screen time" means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_time
I'm just flabbergasted with the level of smokescreen that goes on in this discussion. Pretty sure reading books on ebook readers is not what is driving teenage mental health problems.
Once I finally actually deleted all of the social media apps from my phone, it suddenly became a really pleasant and useful tool again. I have even started to read ebooks again.
117 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadWhich necessarily follows because the closer you look the fewer people are "normal". In fact I'd go so far as to posit that everyone is aberrant, to nobody's surprise.
And of course this is all derivated from a basis of largely qualitative soft-science which had ought be treated as an art than it is a science, however there are pressures which force both practitioners and researchers to justify it as a science.
I'm sure there's some "law of self-awareness" as well. The closest analogy I have is the January Effect which describes an even in the market, a pattern of sell-off in the later year to mark a loss, and subsequent repurchase in January. Upon this pattern being disclosed, the market adapted strategies to exploit it which ultimately resulted in a complete silencing of the effect. In a sense more applicable to this, being diagnosed with some mental illness can also be leveraged to gain favor, I mean I can get a prescription for pharmaceutical grade amphetamines for fidgeting for instance; or excuse my bad behavior with some other diagnosis.
My position is that it's all very unclear. I'm lazy and don't care to dig it up but there was a study from the UK that observed the measurable effects from school based, non-individual interventions and it found their effects to be significantly detrimental for some students - to the extent that they negated the aggregate benefits - which I think supports this position because treatment can exacerbate things. And that's without mentioning pharmacological interventions which are... Interesting.
It really does feel like I was bred in a lab to exist as the counterexample for all this. I was diagnosed with ADHD in middle school and my parents thought exactly as you did and refused treatment. For a long time I held this as a point of pride and thought of my parents as saving me from those cruel teachers that just wanted to keep me down, any why would I question them? I have no other frame of reference and was marked "different" by my teachers and other kids so all of my struggles were just framed in terms of that. And so it went with my anxiety and depression, I didn't have an illness, I was a worrier that just needed to calm down. I didn't have depression I was lazy, angsty, and logical -- that's why I didn't get out of bed all day, thought everything sucked and existence was pain, and so numb I could give Spock a run for his money.
Fast forward to college where I was getting my annual checkup and flu shot and I got my first ever mental health questionnaire. I answered honestly because at the time I genuinely thought that my experience wasn't unusual -- "Doesn't everyone think about killing themselves all the time?" I got referred to a therapist and eventually a psychiatrist for confirmation (because teaching hospital) who both didn't even take an hour to be clock me with all three. I got put on an antidepressant, an anti-anxiety, and a stimulant over the course of about a year and a half and I felt something and then cried for the first time since sixth grade, realized what not having anxiety feels like, and what life is like when you're not constantly in pain from under-stimulation.
I just can't bring myself to think it's all quack science when I was so thoroughly dressed down by these two guys so fast and who took a little less than two years to get them all sorted. It was surreal when the psychiatrist just described my whole life experience without even missing a beat. Life changing undersells it so much and it came out of literally nowhere for me.
This is definitely a thing, it first started getting obvious on Tiktok with Tourette's.
So they didn't have Tourette's and they weren't faking it, but a seriously cool third thing. Monkey see monkey do is a powerful phenomenon. We just treat it as normal when it happens as part of socialization.
It causes mental illness like depression and also stunts social development.
Suicide and emergency room visits for suicide attempts among teenagers are also up, and also on exactly the same post-2010ish timeline.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db471.pdf
Not proof that social media is behind it of course.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm
You know how many nerds didn't know they had any sort of issue other than being antisocial and lonely, and then someone made Slashdot aware of Asperger's and suddenly 90% of the site was self-diagnosed?
To be generous I would say maybe some people have a disorder and that causes them to state they are non binary, but the implication isn’t the other way.
Similarly a mental disorder may make someone obsessed with levels and coding 80hrs a week!
This is as absolutely true as saying elements within the universe are fundementally binary, an atom is either hydrogen or helium (with the exception of atomic aberrations).
The math is the same, 2% of elements within the universe are other than H or He, and 2% of human births have chromosomal aberrations.
To be clearer (and fair to the context): "Pure" intersex is
whereas more general chromosomal aberrations that deviate from " unquestionably male " or from " unquestionably female " come in at just under 2% (as I recall).FWiW I believe there's a bit more to behaviour than pure genetics but it's a hard one to pin down; outside of western society there are many places with a long history for not caring about gender nearly as much as abrahamic westerners seem to; the Bugis, pacific sistergirls, etc.
From a datascience perspective there's a non zero number of actual people in Australia that are born intersex and neither male nor female at birth to warrent a non specific gender entry on passport databases .. as a matter of cold pragmatic fact divorced from any "woke" and|or "culture war" politic posturing.
So it's not really a useful concept at all, and certainly not as an indication of mental disorder.
what?
The narrative that social media is the cause and not the obvious looming climate change, war and wealth inequality is frustrating.
How could you see that as a young person and not feel at least a little hopeless?
Look at figure 1: https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2022/05/31/...
And climate change worry has been going on for much longer.
Based on the evidence available to us, what the little doomscrolling box has done is drive us crazy and actually make it harder for societies to act on these problems.
While indeed, social media and specifically content algorithms (both in the present where they decide which content people see, and in the future where they may indeed create it entirely) are certainly worthy of scrutiny with regard to many mental illnesses, and the ongoing exploitation of the attention of young people especially by figures such as Andrew Tate are doing demonstrable, objective harm to tons and tons of young kids, and the entire notion that simply by virtue of making an account a child can, by default, access the entire breadth of content available on any of these sites, for zero money, with zero notification of their parents, etc., is certainly one that IMO doesn't get nearly enough time in popular discussions as to how we've simply shotgunned all of this into the faces of kids for decades now, with precious little data about what it does to them and it's only accelerating...
THEN, when that conversation happens, it's to explain of all fucking things, anxiety and depression. Not body image issues, not rampant misogyny in young boys, not the growing slice of the crowd that "fails to launch" and remain stuck with mom and dad long after it's traditional to do so, no, none of those things, just anxiety. Anxiety which is a perfectly normal and understandable thing, IMO, to experience in a period of history that's got, in a non-exhaustive list:
- A biosphere on the brink of collapse, and no one in power taking it seriously
- War in Europe involving multiple international powers and one of the larger nations on the planet, which seems like it could incredibly easily boil over into World War III
- Multiple ongoing ethnic cleansings and/or genocides
- The rise of authoritarian fascist movements in several countries
- The rise of unchangeable super-corporations that run more of our lives than ever with zero oversight
Like, as an adult, who has SEEN some shit, I have to meter my intake of world news to avoid entering a depressive state in which I cannot function. I have already had a vasectomy because this world is not one I want to bring children into, and my wife got her tubes tied, because there is a non-trivial chance that she won't have the ability in a few years to do so and feels similarly. And it's all well and good to say "well the 24 hour news cycle is probably behind that," maybe? But maybe if said news cycle ever had anything but the worst shit you've ever heard of to report, maybe that would be less of a contributing factor?
I dunno, this just sucks. This incurious response by the dominant media of "well it can't be that the world we're leaving them is fucking awful, it's gotta be those pesky iPhones" is so dismissive and shitty.
The Smartphone Kids Are Not All Right
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39812623
The pandemic did nothing to help this.
You just had no way to know, and now you do.
Our wonderful, purely well-intentioned politicians could do something about this dire "need for more critical thinking", and yet what do they do to fulfill that need, despite it being literally their responsibility.
https://search.usa.gov/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affiliate=ed.go...
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_cow_(idiom)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_disinformation (what my comment "is")
For example: these terrible people you are referring to out there....are you sure they are as they seem (where did you learn these facts about their intentions from, etc), and that they are enemy number 1?
Moreover, people who want me dead or removed from society because of my political views are in my immediate social or professional circle, no need for social media to meet them.
This is not the norm
My own experiences with social media and phone addiction leads me to believe its not JUST the content, but also (equally, perhaps moreso) the fact that teenagers AND adults with social media and phone addiction are just spending so much of their time absorbed into a screen scrolling and getting quick dopamine hits for hours and hours.
When that is your default that you revert to to distract yourself at almost any point of discomfort, slight boredom, lapse in focus, anxiety or feelings of sadness, all it does is just dampen those feelings momentarily. You live in almost a fugue state where those things just fester as you avoid them instead of learning to cope with them or respond to them in an agentic or healthy manner.
Working to cut out social media, reddit, youtube etc on my phone, leave my phone by our front door while at home, never have my phone in bed, and spend time writing/journaling my thoughts and actually engaging with my feelings of anxiety or depression or stress instead of avoiding them has been by far the most significant improvement on my mental health compared to many other things I've worked out.
This is definitely anecdotal, and its definitely my experience, but after the time i've spent working on these things and with what I see in the teenagers, young people, and friends in my life I feel very strongly about it.
"The medium is the message" never stops being relevant. The 'content' of social media is just the 'reward' mechanism for your engagement.
This is the fourth (?) time on HN I've recommended "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman. If you're a reader, I think you might enjoy it. It is both descriptive of its time in the age of Television, and incredibly prescient. It has aged flawlessly, you can draw a straight line from it to our modern, socially mediated world.
Wikipedia helpfully selected a picture of somebody using an ebook reader as their illustration of what "screen time" means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_time
I'm just flabbergasted with the level of smokescreen that goes on in this discussion. Pretty sure reading books on ebook readers is not what is driving teenage mental health problems.
Social media is so much the problem.