Tuesday, this was the theme at my toastmaster's debate club[1] - I got stuck arguing that social media doesn't make you depressed.
And... my problem with my argument wasn't that it was untrue, but that it was kinda mean. I don't feel jealous of the lives of almost anyone I went to high school with; quite the opposite. A lot of them post "racist memes with spelling mistakes" - which is sad on many levels; If nothing else, it is a certain indicator that they are not living their best lives... but I have a hard time imagining a world where I could be jealous of someone like that.
For that matter, most of the positive social media content I see is baby pictures. I'm one of those people who is glad other people have children; I admire parents, yes, but I certainly wouldn't want to be one myself.
I suppose I just don't get it. Do other people carefully curate their social media lists so that they are only following the super-rich, super-successful and super-articulate? because my experience with social media is that I see people closer to 'average' when I log in to facebook, whereas in real life, I live in a world where most people I spend time interacting with are smarter and wealthier and more successful than I am on several other axes.
I'm not on social media aside from Reddit. But what I notice with my wife and others is a simple reason why I dislike it. If you have 400 friends, and they each only take one vacation a year, that means 8x per week, you're looking at other people taking a vacation. Even if you travel 4x per year, you'll still feel like you never do anything and everyone else is always celebrating their life.
I realize this is a simple example, but it's valid and wears you down over time. Also, even having a handful of very wealthy friends can eventually lead to feelings of envy.
In past times, most people grew up surrounded by people similar to them in terms of wealth and status - but in today's world that's no longer the case.
>Also, even having a handful of very wealthy friends can eventually lead to feelings of envy.
I.. huh. I really don't get this. Maybe it is because I am doing better than I thought I was going to for the first half of my life? or maybe I'm just less jealous than most people? but yeah, there are a few people I follow who you could say I am envious of; people who are super successful in all the ways I want to be successful, but I think it's good rather than bad, because I feel a connection to what I want and admire, and there's this person I really admire who is talking with me. That is... kinda neat, you know? Like showing up at your buddy's weekend board game party and finding the inventor of a famous programming language was also invited.
I guess I don't see how seeing people who are more successful than you on facebook could possibly be more distressing than seeing those people at work (and you will and always have seen those people at work. We've always had bosses.)
Even in person, I've always found being around people that are better than I am (better by my standards) to be fun and exciting. I don't think this is uncommon, really.
If you are perfectly content with your life, then Facebook probably won’t be an issue at all. But if you have _any_ area where you don’t feel fulfilled - like bad life/work balance, insufficient funds, loneliness, unfulfilled baby wish - then Facebook is going to rub it into your face, daily, that others have what you desire, and does it in a misleading way.
Let’s say you can’t have a baby and you have a colleague with 4 kids at work. In real life, you talk to them, get a grasp of their situation, and might realize the caveats - Eg they also had an unfulfilled baby wish at first (which gives you hope), or you can offset the perceived „unfairness“ with the areas they are lacking in (eg they often feel overwhelmed by the kids or are sick a lot). On Facebook, you have an army of super-happy baby making machines, posting Instagram filtered of happy smiles in the sunny park, kids cuddling with a dog, birthday candles... the bad moments are very rarely reported - and when they are, lots of people flock to the post and comment, making that person their center of attention (= socially important). But they won’t write next to that happy picture „right after, baby cried for 45 minutes and I almost had a nervous breakdown“ because you don’t appear to be in a favorable position when writing that.
[As a father of two, I was never directly affected by an unfulfilled baby wish, but a friend of ours was.]
Your comments in here really resonate with me too, I think social media might be pouring gasoline on the fire of jealousy, but if you're not jealous to begin with all I think about is: "Oh wow, here's a photo of Kristy in mexico with a monkey, ha!" and that's it, no jealousy, no inner dialogue of "I wish I was there and not her" or anything. I could look at pictures like that all day and not be affected, but when it's someone I know personally I'm actually a little happy _for_ them.
>If you are perfectly content with your life, then Facebook probably won’t be an issue at all. But if you have _any_ area where you don’t feel fulfilled - like bad life/work balance, insufficient funds, loneliness, unfulfilled baby wish - then Facebook is going to rub it into your face, daily, that others have what you desire, and does it in a misleading way.
I am super amused that in the middle of a heated debate on the internet, a stranger is implying that I am a happy, well-balanced person with a full life :)
> But if you have _any_ area where you don’t feel fulfilled then Facebook is going to rub it into your face, daily, that others have what you desire, and does it in a misleading way.
Reading this, I'm very happy that I don't really use Facebook.
> I guess I don't see how seeing people who are more successful than you on facebook could possibly be more distressing than seeing those people at work
I think you're hoping over a few categorical issues that create the social media dysthymia. It's not about seeing people who are more successful. It's not about "better" or "worse". It's about social regulation in formative egos.
From your posts you are coming off like an aspergersy male adult engineer -- I'm one of those myself, so I mean that with love -- dealing in concrete world value from the perspective of a fully formed ego not used to internalizing the external. Equating the discontent with rational motives jealousy or envy or desire, instead of judgement and personal failings implicit in habitual social comparison.
Fundamentally social media habits can create two major areas of discontent: comparing your behind-the-scenes life with other peoples highlights reels, and the comparability of the elevated personalities. To take your "boss" example: that's generally not someone I identify with deeply because my daddy wasn't as rich, and I didn't inherit the company, and blah blah blah. To our primate brains `bosses` tend to be `others` and not `us`. If that boss were your childhood buddy, OTOH, you'd have a different take on things... And that different take, and the implied reflection of being less than or worse than, that you would have with a familiar person having that role is what social media does with vacation pics and such. You're not seeing someone in another group, like someone famous, doing something fun. You're seeing someone in your group doing it, causing an implicit comparison. And this comparison is based on purpose-selected content made to project a happy image, is non-stop, asymmetrical, and always worst when you're at your lowest.
These contexts and framings are fundamental to how marketing works on us, and are a shared facet of human representation of the world around them. What you're not getting here is what a 15 yo will feel like after 3 hours a day of staring at a crappy feed that you, and most people on HN, would find deadly boring. We're also old enough and self respecting enough to avoid that crap when/if it starts to hurt. I bet HN readers are highly active online and suspiciously inactive on social media...
I... really enjoyed your comment. I'm drifting off, so I probably won't respond to all of it, but thanks. that was pretty insightful.
>From your posts you are coming off like an aspergersy male adult engineer
Yes, and even more so in that I've put myself in a world where I'm surrounded by people who (I believe) are even more aspergersy (if you are using the word how I think you are using it) than I am, which I actually really enjoy, but in many ways I'm very insulated (and comfortable) within my bubble.
>To our primate brains `bosses` tend to be `others` and not `us
This is one of those things that all the evidence points to being true; I mean, I read leadership books, and I read about how militaries are structured and I agree with you... but this doesn't feel true in my life. I don't feel like my boss is an 'other' and I didn't feel like my employees were others when I had employees[1]. I mean, unless it's a non-technical boss; the business side of the house is entirely "other" in my book. I can get along with those people okay, but yes, it's different.
>You're not seeing someone in another group, like someone famous, doing something fun. You're seeing someone in your group doing it, causing an implicit comparison.
Huh. But... I like it when people in my group succeed. I feel like I've put a lot of effort into getting into a group that values the things I value, and where most other people in that group are better at those things I value than I am. When those people succeed, it shows that my group is a strong group that can get things done. Also, more successful friends means more good job leads :)
[1]of course, I don't think I was a particularly good boss... if you consider all business people to be "others" -- perhaps you should figure out how to change that before starting a business. but, I mean, I have been the boss, and while I was a weird boss, it wasn't unnatural to me, and perhaps more importantly, the idea of being the boss wasn't unnatural to me, it was just a job that it turns out that I'm not very good at.
Perhaps there's a difference if you meet someone who is already successful or who's past accomplishments you admire versus that idiot in high school who barely passed chemistry by cheating off your answers, exibited the worst of the sexist jock/bro mentality, skated by on his good looks and is now driving a lambo and married to a supermodel.
I can't understand why someone over 25 that has a decent career (assuming you are a programmer since it's HN) would still care about what some chad from high school is doing. Worrying about how "unfair" life is is an energy and time black hole.
This is shocking to me, too. I mean, I don't care what Chad is up to today, but the general trauma of high school is still with me in a way that I don't think is reasonable, considering that my experience wasn't unusual, and that it happened twenty years ago.
See also Dahl's "galloping Foxley" for a literary take on the phenomena.
I'm still not seeing how that is any more distressing than seeing, say, your boss' boss, who once took obvious relish in firing one of your friends, continue to be successful in the office every day, you know?
You are going to encounter your financial superiors at work quite often, in ways that are a lot more directly impactful and a lot harder to ignore than pictures on facebook, and this is not new.
I specifically cut out Reddit entirely. Subreddits quickly end up being insular groupthink echo chambers, thanks to the voting system and biased moderators.
The noise:content ratio is simply skewed way towards pointless noise. It's not worth it.
I've found that Reddit improves dramatically as you move away from the huge default subreddits and into smaller, more focused subs -- for hobbies you're involved in, for instance. For that sort of thing it's not half bad.
Some of the country subreddits I know, /r/France or /r/Belgium, or misc. interests like /r/gardening /r/dwarffortress are definitely not "gamed by marketers". For those that are about topics that are more easy prey to advertising, competent moderation usually works fine.
It's really not that difficult to find interesting and genuine subreddits.
You’re absolutely right. For anyone who wants to test this, try searching for “State Farm” in Reddit and you’ll see the results almost never have anything to do with whether Statefarm actually pays claims, is fair priced, or a good value to the customer. The posts are all from their internal marketing department doing shit like posting a false AMA request for Jake from State Farm as some kind of low-quality joke to shy away from the points that actually matter.
Not really. The small city-based subs are alright and the hobby based subs are pretty good, bots don't really waste their time in the 'long tail' as of yet, but that will be changing in the next 5 years.
You might also want to look at why other people's happens or success makes you feel bad. It's a very common feeling but it's unhealthy and a sign that you have poor self-esteem.
That may be true, but poor self-esteem is dramatically more common among young/developing people trying to figure out their place in the world. There are plenty of exceptions to that in both ways (young people with great self-esteem, older people without it), but I think that kids/teenagers will always be uniquely susceptible to ego "body blows" of the sort that social media makes very easy to receive.
If you really do look down on your old friends and acquaintances like that (so that you see their posts as all about being poorer and less articulate than you), then you're probably the one making posts that depress them.
Imagine yourself as if you went to highschool in the society where you now work (so that now, the people you used to know are twice as educated and lots of them are far more wealthy), or perhaps imagine what it would be like to have stayed in your old town while someone else went to SV!
> If you really do look down on your old friends and acquaintances like that (so that you see their posts as all about being poorer and less articulate than you), then you're probably the one making posts that depress them.
Sometimes, yes, and that is the cause of some negative self-reflection on my part, but I think that there's another factor at work... I think that especially the "racist memes with spelling mistakes' crowd just values different things from what I value. For many of them, they see education as a negative attribute except to the extent that it intersects with income, (this attitude is creeping into HN, I think) and even then... you have to understand that unlike most of the people I work with now, I went to a school where scholastic aptitude was something you hid, if you were smart.
>Imagine yourself as if you went to highschool in the society where you now work (so that now, the people you used to know are twice as educated and lots of them are far more wealthy)
I've wondered what this would have been like. I mean, arrogance has always been with me; and I think I am a lot more aware of my own arrogance than other people are? But a big part of that is that for so many of my friends now, I am 'normal' or maybe even below average - just because they went to really exclusive schools then worked at prestigious places. They have a completely different view of what is normal.
What if I always existed in a world where I wasn't "special"? I imagine I'd be a better person, socially. But maybe not? I dunno.
>or perhaps imagine what it would be like to have stayed in your old town while someone else went to SV!
I... did move back to my hometown for a while. It was... not an experience I care to repeat.
>I went to a school where scholastic aptitude was something you hid, if you were smart.
That's a very common experience I'm actually surprised to hear that it's ever any other way.
To go a bit historical materialist on you, I think that if you took the kids at your old school and made them ten times better at thinking and ten times worse at everything else, their values would re-adjust so that they felt valuable again. People balance their values between the need to have a target to work towards and the desire to not feel terrible all the time - if you're very bad at something you're unlikely to find it an appropriate goal or a comfortable self-measure.
>That's a western thing. In the east being smart is cool.
I thought it was an exclusive school thing. The Americans I know who went to exclusive high schools seem to have had very different experiences. I even know several people (who went to a 'special' highschool for 'gifted' children) who claimed that they enjoyed high school more than college.
I went to an "elite" private high school. The handful of kids who chose to take a gap year or to gasp not go to college at all were looked upon with such scorn. But no one was more looked down-upon than the kids who only got into "safety schools."
That said -- being in an environment where your intellect was directly correlated to your social standing was pretty nourishing and really encouraged the best in (most) people.
I went to a private high school. I was not a gifted student in any way. I was actually denied by the school but my parents begged the principal so they give me a chance to study there (I learned these details years later). And it was actually a very enjoyable experience. Being smart was not something you hide. The sporty guys were the most popular like many other places, but there was no bullying because of your geekness.
I did one year of public high school (which I failed) before I went to private school. And the experience was a total different world.
Nope. I was educated mostly at public (private) school in the UK, and spent a year at a private school in the US.
I was ruthlessly mocked until I learned to dissemble, to not put my hand up to answer a question, to be publicly told off by teachers for not handing in work.
The reason is simple - if you make others feel inferior, by being better at anything in any way than them, they hate and envy you.
I think the difference is that everybody believes that they too could be a sports star, in the same way as everybody believes that they too will one day be rich - whereas intellect is a rather fixed quantity - so point taken, I was overly broad.
Physical prowess is probably just as limited as intelligence, although our culture definitely associates strength with the gym and smarts with being born that way (although both traits will be equally useless if not developed by training).
I think there's a "social proximity" effect to it.
If you see someone you consider immensely superior to yourself on TV, for example, you're likely to consider yourself either disconnected (and not threatened) by them, or entertain a fantasy of "I could be that someday" (see: most Americans).
Alternatively, if you see someone you consider even slightly superior to yourself who is situated similarly in social hierarchy to you, or who you encounter as a peer or near-peer in your everyday life (e.g. a classmate, friend, or sibling), the threat response is much stronger.
I don't know why this is (maybe "this person maybe could take my food/resources/whatever, notices me, and is materially able to take from me" versus "this person definitely could take my food/resources/whatever but does not know me and is not materially able to take from me" brain-stem thinking?)
I meant 'sports stars' in the context of high school... people who certainly could and traditionally did take food resources away from more scholarly children.
Everyone loves a winner, on some level. But are sports stars generally popular with the public or among their peers, or teammates?
Michael Jordan, was/is endured to the public for his talent and work ethic, but I don’t believe he was adored quite the same by teammates or opponents.
> For many of them, they see education as a negative attribute
Yes it's an unfortunate byproduct of the link between education and left wing ideology.
We often joked that people who go away to college come back dumber than when they left.
As an example when my daughter was in college she came to visit us and was talking about how I was contributing to the patriarchy and enabling the oppression of women and how women have it so much worse.
And I'm sitting there thinking what happened to my sweet girl and why am I working a stressful job with long hours to help pay for her to learn this kind of crap.
If I'm reading this correctly, it's a nasty personal attack. That's not allowed on this site regardless of how wrong you think someone else's views are, and we ban accounts that do it. Please don't do it again.
His issue was "racist meme with spelling mistake" which is not about them being poorer or less articulate. The part about them promoting racist memes is not just a function about being poor or less articulate or less educated. Only spelling mistake part has something to do with education.
Plenty of rich educated people are racists.
Turning it into him making them depressed (are they even depressed?) Is quite unfair and waaay to much benefit of doubt to them and waaay too little to him.. It is not his fault they believe in whatever that racist meme promoted.
As others have pointed out in responding to you, you don't only have to be following the super-rich and super-successful for your feeds to project an image skewed toward their experiences.
Thanks to the heavy-tailed distribution of most aspirational resources (whether that is followers/friends, likes/retweets or various offline resources), we encounter a "generalized friendship paradox" (see https://doi.org/10.15195/v1.a10 among others) where on average our friends in our social networks score more highly on a variety of attributes than we do.
So it's enough for us to follow a few individuals on the long tail of a distribution for the paradox to apply that, even though most of our friends might not be particularly impressive individuals when compared to ourselves, on average our friends are much more popular, successful and beautiful than we are. Thanks to the structure of our networks (and online networks might have greater skew than offline networks), socially-induced anxiety can come about quite quickly. Not a lot of curation is needed.
This is pretty much my exact experience with social media. I grew up in a remote, working class area. Many of the people I grew up around are lower SES than I ended up being. Of course, I'm the lucky one that got out of that so my relative well being is pretty high. Who knows what it would be like if I grew up in a wealthy suburb of a major city.
That said, I do find myself drained after spending too much non creative screen time. News sites, twitter feeds, fb, insta, etc. . . . Anecdotes and all, but the screen time hypothesis jives well with my personal experience.
Note that the article is on teens, an age group where as a general rule everyone is super hormonal and therefore emotionally changable and hyper aware of social status.
You're trying to look at this through the eyes of an adult, presumably one with a reasonably good career judging by other comments you've made.
I think this is likely the most powerful factor among the possible explanations given here, and I'm not sure why your comment did not provoke more discussion.
Saying teens are "hyper-aware of social status" is not going far enough: the teenage years are a period of social awakening in which we reach new levels of understanding, empathy, and theory of mind.
From a physical perspective a lot of teenage behaviour can be attributed to various brain structures developing at different rates (specifically, structures associated with emotions developing quicker than the structures associated with rational inhibitions).
Mentally speaking, a lot of teenage development is about the brain growing and "recalibrating" to deal with the new sensations this growth brings.
It is not a great leap from there to expect that social media, with their hyper-optimised feedback-loops, are capable of greatly disturbing this process.
>I live in a world where most people I spend time interacting with are smarter and wealthier and more successful than I am on several other axes
Maybe this is a relatively rare situation. I'd assume for most people, their FB life and "real" life social spheres coincide quite much.
(And because I love speculating, maybe you are the odd one out in your FB circles, the cool successful hacker living in SV and who interacts daily with the super-smart-super-wealthy people, not stuck in a life situation where "posting racist memes with spelling mistakes" is sensible use of their time.)
>the cool successful hacker living in SV and who interacts daily with the super-smart-super-wealthy people,
That sentence makes me laugh, because when I grew up (and I'm not certain if this is "when" or "where," really.) that could only be said with a heavy dose of sarcasm.
That is a fallacy, whether worded as a rhetorical question or explicitly as "faulty generalisation" or "fallacy of defective induction". The fact is that the subjective observation is generalised without any buttressing evidence whatsoever. "That's not my experience, so that's doubtful."
It absolutely is not a fallacy, nor is it an inherently rhetorical question. Inquiring as to whether others share your experience isn't illogical; it's the root of most human learning and understanding thus far, and I suspect it precedes most other methods of claim-buttressing. And, to be pedantic, the fallacies you mentioned are specifically in terms of drawing conclusions from that faulty logic; not asking questions.
Also, faulty evidence for a claim is not the same as false evidence for a claim. If I have zero other information besides "other humans exist and act similar to me", and "that object is grey", I can infer that it is more likely than not that other humans see the object as grey. This is faulty in that it is subjective and not rigorous (I could be colorblind), but it is not inherently wrong or invalid reasoning. This is a common annoyance of mine when the terms "fallacy" or "faulty logic" are bandied about: the presence of insufficient logic is only problematic when an insufficiently-premised claim is evaluated against a more-sufficiently-premised claim without considering the differences in the quality of the evidence/premises.
GP doesn't ask a question, he literally says I don't get it. The article is about post millennial teenagers' employ of technology and the effects therefrom, she/he doesn't even make comparative claims or mention this. It was a lazy post.
I have interpreted the comment in question---which BTW I don't really recall ATM--as drawing conclusions, not as asking questions. That's why I thought is fallacious. I may well be mistaken in that, so sorry if that's the case.
Not helpful, facilitating contempt for people is not the opposite of facilitating depression.
It's even worse when it facilitates contempt for your peer group, e.g. dumb yuppie millennial shit prejudicing interactions with the neighbors, coworkers, people that have tech jobs and live near you etc.
You have a good point. Really, I spend a lot more of my "negative or critical self-reflection" time thinking about my own arrogance and contempt...
At my debate club, I mentioned this part way through the argument, that I did find my own argument distressingly (and depressingly) arrogant and sad; It was pointed out that in debate club, it is traditional to not undermine your own argument.
Many of you are speaking about the social aspects of smartphones and social media, but I think a big issue is also the cognitive impact of short-term gratification due to internet/tech addiction. Happiness often comes from feeling competent. If teens attention spans are dwindling due to this addiction, they are going to grow up without the grit to persist and develop skills.
I agree with this. It's not about "jealousy" towards your friends on fb. It's about feeding the attention-monkey. And the more you feed that monkey the more it wants.
Healthy brains spend time (much time) prior to attention, just being. I like to go on long walks and practice breathing. Dissolving mind and attention leads to great clarity, when the thoughts are needed.
Society as a whole does not seem to recognize the attention-burden, for example, more and more advertising and television images are showing up everywhere. It is not possible to just relax and be, while commuting or getting around town. People seem to assume that this is the way to live. It is not.
>Healthy brains spend time (much time) prior to attention, just being. I like to go on long walks and practice breathing. Dissolving mind and attention leads to great clarity, when the thoughts are needed.
Yes, there is a reason practices like meditation, physical movements during prayer (yoga, Jewish and Islamic practices of prayer), etc. have lasted thousands of years. The screens are not the first attention-jackers to come around and they won't be the last.
I'm blocking social media on my phone now (LeechBlock), I mean I know how to disable it, but it reminds me of not doing it. When I activated it I started noticing how often I just habitually check my phone to get trapped in this hole. My rule is now to only use social media when I'm at home on my computer. That already precludes 95% of my social media use, because I'm rarely at home.
I have a smartphone only since I'm 24. I can't imagine what it's like for a teenager growing up this way.
I'm dabbling with mindfulness as well now, and I jog without electronics. Listening to music while jogging isn't really something that has to do with social media, but more about the meditative aspect of jogging.
Until September, I was teaching A-level at 2 schools in the UK, and had been since 2002. Over the last 3-4 years, the ability of students to apply themselves and concentrate (independent of their ability) seemed to drop away completely. Obviously purely anecdotal, but my teaching experience became much worse in that time period; I'm glad to not be doing it any more, which is sad because it's something I actually love doing when it goes well.
I see this in the students I mentor. Every single one of them cannot focus on a single task for longer than 60 seconds, which is severely hampering their ability to think deeply about abstract programming and data science problems. It's very frustrating, but they just cannot stop checking their phones for updates
What types students are you mentoring? I've observed that groups of the best-performing students look down on those "addicted" to their phones and some have switched to flip phones.
I actually prefer vintage design (e.g. Nokia 8210, designed by Kenzo), but unfortunately these old phones aren't compatible enough, 2G networks are phased out and are already switched off in many places.
im not sure you can have flip + modern in a phone. ive never seen it anyway
if the idea of having a flip phone is so that you will be less distracted then maybe a flip case might help to do something similar. preferably one that has really loud velcro so that people around you will get pissed if you keeping opening it every 2nd minute to look at facecheck
Except from 2010 - 2015 many teens did feel a crushing sense of economic dread as they dealt with the realities of student loans, an out of reach housing market, devalued college degrees, the gig economy, promises of no retirement, etc.
The article just skims over it with a quick this is why economics couldn’t have been the reason.
> the realities of student loans, an out of reach housing market, devalued college degrees, the gig economy, promises of no retirement, etc.
Have you ever met a teenager? Almost literally zero percent of them think (or need to think) about this stuff, with the possible exception of some of the very oldest teenagers (ie, people in their first or second year of college who are starting to think about the details of the start of their careers).
When I was a teenager I didn’t think further than 5 years ahead. I did however write goth poetry, become Wiccan (and thus got all mopey about being at a Catholic school), get upset how unfair it was that UK law looked down on my sexuality (it had not yet equalised the gay and straight ages of consent), and frustrated how ridiculous it was for the Prime Minister to veto every EU thing he could in protest against the BSE-related ban on British beef. Ended up writing loads of letters to newspapers about politics of the day before internet comments were a big thing, then going to university really worried if my student loan would cover everything.
Teenagers might not think in these terms, but their parents do. Aside from parents directly projecting their vision on children, kids can read anxiety or stress from their parents and be ‘contamined’ by these feelings.
Right, absolutely. That's a different claim from the GP comment, and a reasonable one. The authors noted that the symptoms were independent of economic indicators. Now obviously this study is an initial result, and thus fairly preliminary (if you believe any effect in social science after a single study, you haven't been paying attention). But it's not like this is a rebuttal of the study's claims.
You must have known a mindless set of teenagers. When I was a teenager people actively talked about their resentment that arts and humanities were not going to get them a well paying job and society was biased in favor of people like me who found math and science easy. And this would have been tenth grade, if not earlier.
Edit: for historical context, this was nearly two decades ago and nobody had either a mobile phone or a Facebook account
Teenagers I do know personally talk about being worried about jobs, housing, debt and general economical problems. I never start those discussions, they do.
> You don't need a house. Many of the kids I knew growing up lived in apartments.
Apartments are part of the housing market
> If they lived in a house they could inherit it from their parents.
Teenagers probably want to move out of their parents home (be it a house or apartment).
> Why is the housing market something children worry about?
See above : teenagers often want and look forward to independence, and housing is 100% central to that goal. Their future horizon may be a little shallower than that of the average adult, but they do have a horizon - i.e short term goals that they want to achieve.
At least for me, that meant figuring out how I was going to actually live on my own come 18. You can bet I was worried about housing prices (even if my immediate goal was to rent).
> If they lived in a house they could inherit it from their parents.
Heh "hi mom, dad, FYI I'm planning to live with you and my two siblings until I'm around 50 and then you can die and it'll just be us three kids here".
I strongly disagree. If you are 16 and it seems like you won't be able to get living and there is stigma attached to living with parents, worrying about it is sign that you think about world around you. That is healthy.
16 years old are not necessary movie dumbos. It is time when people form opinions and think a lot. The result does not have to be hapiness, if indeed expectations on you and your possibilities don't match.
>Almost literally zero percent of them think (or need to think) about this stuff, with the possible exception of some of the very oldest teenagers (ie, people in their first or second year of college who are starting to think about the details of the start of their careers).
What? EVERY teenager thinks about it. Not only that, their parents financial situations and the prospects of the future most definitely influences their outlook.
What teenager doesn't talk about or think of their future? The entirety of high school is pretty much about preparing for college, finding a job, etc.
Yes, preparing for _college_ and _finding a job_. The details of how you're going to pay your day to day are far hazier, as are things like "the gig economy" and retirement.
If you were worrying about your future mortgage when you're a teenager, I can assure you you were in the minuscule minority.
Only the oldest of teens would worry about those things. I agree they're all bad but I'm not convinced they'd have much of an impact on under 17 year olds.
I'm extremely hacked off that the high school I'm sending my kids to requires students to have an ipad. It's expensive for me, of no benefit to the student, and makes it difficult for students and parents to figure out what homework is due becuase it's scattered around various websites depending on the teacher's whim. It also means he has a screen to fight with us over that he would not have had otherwise. Then the younger kids get annoyed he has one and they don't. There is no upside.
I asked my oldest son why he doesn't invite his friends around more often and he said 'I can talk to them online'.
> I'm extremely hacked off that the high school I'm sending my kids to requires students to have an ipad
My nephews in primary school had android tablets but had to get new ipads (second hand not supported) for the "programming" class that was introduced with proprietary drag'n'drop programming software. A raspberry pi would not only have been much cheaper but would have had much more potential as an educational tool.
No benefit? Maybe you mean that you prefer an Android tablet? I didn't have a computer until I was 18. The internet wasn't much of a thing until I got to college. Every day I think about how amazing it would have been to have access to so much free information when I was a kid.
I spent much of my teenage years playing video games, building/overclocking computers, flashing roms on my phones, and devouring wikipedia. my parents were concerned that I was spending too much time online but I'm glad they didn't try to intervene. I was learning tons and by the time I got to college pretty much everything in the CS degree was trivially easy for me (except some of the formal math stuff).
on the flip side, I am quite certain that most of my peers spent their hours primarily on youtube, facebook, and aim. they seemed to take pride in how little they understood the workings of their entertainment devices.
today I hear a lot of parents talking about how they are putting off getting a family computer/tablet for as long as possible and how they intend to severely limit screen time once they finally get one. it makes me sad to think that these children will miss out on all the great learning experiences I had with my computers, but I'm not sure the parents are necessarily wrong, especially with the current buzz around social media and mental health.
I get it, and what I was responding to was the "no benefit" comment. I carry research articles and books on my phone that I can read with any spare moment. It's amazing actually, and I don't see the point of throwing the baby out with the bath water.
> on the flip side, I am quite certain that most of my peers spent their hours primarily on youtube, facebook, and aim. they seemed to take pride in how little they understood the workings of their entertainment devices.
People, kids especially, love wasting time. All that changes is how they do the time wasting.
I spent every waking hour tinkering with my C64, and made a career from that.
But a C64 is a very different beast from a ipad or even a rpi. I think the percentage of owners back then tinkered with them as well as just loading up games was much higher.
I haven't heard of a single kid in my son's classes who has tried programming. The thing is just a TV/mobile game console.
Thank god they haven't hit facebook yet, at least the ones I know.
I guess nothing has changed much haha. I was a teenager in the late 90s and early 00s; none of that existed. The only kids using computers then were interested in games, hacking on them, or using them for some productivity task.
How many people are interested in how cars work vs just use them to get around? Computing is just ubiquitous now but people who really care about how they work are still a small minority.
No, I mean a tablet is a stupid thing for a school student to have. I could sort of see the point of a cheap laptop or chromebook - at least typing on them is reasonable. But there is nothing wrong with writing on paper either.
Teachers giving homework printed on paper makes it easier for the student and parent to know what homework there is to be done.
And printing from tablets? Come on. I don't know about Android tablets but it ain't easy from an iPad.
My kids aren't living in some tech backwater - we have more than enough computers from 8 to 64 bits they could do something useful with.
But there is no upside to me having to buy each of them an iPad - not for me or them. Even iPad games are just stupid free-to-play-pay-to-speed-up-progress games. All the kids give each other for birthday these days are itunes cards that get spend on 'gems'.
I don't think many teens (13-18) are doing much deep thinking about those things. I was a teenager about a bit more about than a decade before this time period, so maybe things were just so great then I didn't consider these things. But it seems like a stretch to me that a middle school or high school student is depressed because they are worried about retirement. Things like that were far too abstract to be contributing factors to my mental state at that age.
Am teenager. I'm not too worried about my future because I have some decent development skills. However, a lot of my friends are depressed because a lot of these issues really aren't so far in the future as to be "too abstract." It doesn't take a huge mental leap to realize that the college educations we're about to drop $50k+ on might not help us get jobs in the near future, or that working until we die will sort of suck, or that a pregnancy is an instant game-over (but it's okay, because apparently teens don't have sex anymore), or that most of the jobs we're going to end up getting are meaningless and will soon be automated away, so why not just off ourselves right now? It's scary. I sure as hell hope that tech now is the equivalent of the factory jobs of the 40's, so by the time my skills don't matter, I'll be set or dead.
Sounds like you guys are way more in touch with this than we were. I guess it could make sense with how fast information gets around. When I was 13 the only way I would get this information would be through newspaper or TV news, which I didn't have time for.. I was playing hockey with my friends and playing video games if our parents didn't kick us outside.
I regret saying too abstract, I intended more to say this stuff was too far into the future that it would really worry me. I figured we were smart enough that by the time I got older we'd figure out a way to make life easier for everyone.
There are a lot of memes that go around people my age/younger than me (I'm 24), that make reference to depression / the fact that people don't really think that they have a chance at making a decent life. It's a humorous take on it, but it's manifesting a deeper anxiety, and it seems to have become a big thing in the past two years or so.
I moved to America about 18 months ago from New Zealand, and noticed that while Americans have more "stuff" they carry a lot more anxiety too. There's a lot less room for error. I think that's the same thing that's happened over generations. We've squeezed the big things - wages, housing prices, middle-class jobs and pumped up our general consumption. So we have more, but less security.
Currently a father of teens... That is a huge subject of discussion in high schools. Teens do talk a lot about the economy, ROI of different degrees (nursing being the best, law school and engineering giving less chance of jobs and being much harder, everything else being useless), that their passions don't matter, they have to get a degree that leads to jobs, number of years before they can afford living on their own etc...
Screen time is a symptom, not a cause. One of the vital drives of adolescents are to gain independence from their parents and figure out their own place in life. To do this, teens need to interact with peers, hang out, make mistakes, and generally be sociable.
Our society, largely, does not allow this. Instead, safety fears, need for cars, etc, keep teens at home. So what else is a teen to do to interact socially with their peers? Online is the least-bad remaining outlet for this desire - if they can't hang out in a parking lot or whatever, at least they can take selfies on instagram or whatever.
The solution isn't to ban or reduce smartphone usage, like you would if smartphone usage itself was causing problems. The solution is to make it easier and more accepted to hang out face-to-face.
Ban the phone and keep the isolating culture and you wind up with even more isolated teens.
Of course. Banning phones doesn't make any sense and computers are pretty much the same thing in the context of home. Self-moderation is critical here, though hard to do
Yes. I teach at a college. Every day I see scenes like a couple walking across campus, obviously walking together, but each on their phone instead of talking to each other.
And 100 years ago, your comment would read "I see a couple walking across campus, obviously walking together, but each staring silently at the sidewalk instead of talking to each other".
Not every moment needs to be constantly filled with chatter, and if there's nothing to say, there's nothing to say. Sometimes just the act of physically being near each other is enough.
IT can be a symptom if the underlying reason are parents that have become over-protective. Teens meeting in public places are often associated with anti-social behaviour nowadays. It's not that all teens prefer meeting online but with many parents that's a lot easier.
I think the "likely culprit" is, as it has always been, just the "human condition."
The coming into an unknown world, ignorant of everything, constantly reconciling conflicting ideas, nagged by a sense of ultimate pointlessness, and the dread of inevitable mortality. However we may try to pooh-pooh these things away, they've been an incurable source of unhappiness since time immemorial.
Humans cannot be truly happy unless we keep ourselves seriously deluded or constantly distracted; with biosocial emotions, religion, duty, hope, ambition, goals, pleasure or whatever.
Throughout our history the distraction has mostly been provided by daily struggle for survival, but the comforts of civilization and technology, and the increasing knowledge of the species as a whole, have been laying us bare to the above.
We probably either have to keep cooking up new distractions, or we'll need to sit down as an species and conduct a no-bullshit review of what it means to be human, and everyone's place, right and requirements in this world, and our combined place in the cosmos.
That may be the underlying cause of some suicides but it doesn't explain why depression and suicides have increased for teenagers in the last 5 years. Also, if we need distraction to survive the ultimate meaninglessness of life as you claim then why would technology make depression worse instead of better?
> why would technology make depression worse instead of better?
I can only speak for myself, of course, and in my case, the ever increasing access to information and social contacts, actually eliminates the hope of finding any large-scale meaning in this world, ever-so-gradually, when you keep failing to see any point no matter what you learn and who you meet.
Not exactly depression, maybe it falls under nihilism, but.. Everything just is, and it doesn't ultimately matter what you do.
I suspect that even if I had a starship capable of traveling to other worlds, and a long enough lifespan to see them all, I'd still find everything ultimately pointless.
So what if life objectively has no meaning? You can only experience it through your own subjective viewpoint, so why not find something that is subjectively meaningful to you?
And there lies the problem. That means your lack of existence is on par with anything else. So you can find something random meaningful to you or poof just end it early.
Usually this leads to drugs first and not outright suicide, but it is still nonetheless quite harmful to the individual.
I think you missed my point... your lack of existence is on par with anything else, to some objective observer. You are not an objective observer. You can choose to care about yourself. You just have to accept the trade off that caring about something means there will inevitably be some pain to go along with it too when things don't work out the way you want.
>Humans cannot be truly happy unless we keep ourselves seriously deluded or constantly distracted; with biosocial emotions, religion, duty, hope, ambition, goals, pleasure or whatever.
Typical internet denizen idea of humanity.
Religious people are not all deluding themselves into happiness. Quite a lot of them find religion to be a framework with comes with its own sources of existential dread.
Emotions are a delusion to keep us happy? Hope is also a delusion to keep us happy? ...what?
Almost all of the things that drive us and govern our lives are based entirely on the approval of other humans or our biological needs; the approval of our parents, peer pressure, love, sex, academic grades, job, income, social/political/professional standing, or religion and the idea of deities, and even the worth/value of our contribution to society..
Would any of these matter at all to a different intelligent species? Say, a hypothetical species without any gender. Poof. More than half of human values and aspirations become meaningless.
"Happiness" that is to last for more than a fleeting moment depends entirely on what we choose to believe. That is some pretty flimsy grounds.
>Would any of these matter at all to a different intelligent species?
That's not how mattering works.
On the other hand, I just noticed your username, and you know, it totally fits. How did I not notice that the guy proclaiming the pointlessness of life is calling himself, "Rasengan"? Come on, please tell me this is all some jocular TTGL reference.
They did a study using Facebook. But I'm more curious about Instagram. "Look at all these rich beautiful people with millions of followers sailing around the world on their yachts." Ten minutes on Instagram is enough to fill any sane person with existential dread and bring about severe depression.
For my son (17 y.o.) it is online games and phone use in general. He has - I hope - mild depression, which - I believe - is caused by his online habits.
His mom and I thought taking his PC away from him would fix it. But then he falls into school-sleep cycle, that looks like full-blown depression.
Yes, his grades are affected and in not a good way.
What works for now is to participate in his life with him. As of now we are at a Volleyball tournament. While he "sucks" at it, the social interaction and sense of belonging to the team/cause that puts a wide smile on his face.
Not saying we should take phones away from kids, but certainly they should be treated as potentially harming things when used incorrectly: guns, alcohol (, drugs?), etc.
In any case, Volleyball includes scores of girls dressed in spandex, so there is hope he will get interested in them and starts to think how to get to them rather than look at the phone.
My parents went through the same thing with me. Turns out I just really, really like computers and I get really, really anxious around new people. That time of your life when everything is awkward and you're full of hormones certainly doesn't help.
He's 17 which is the "I think I'm an adult" area. Every 2 years he'll be looking back and thinking, "wow, I was really young".
Tread cautiously, treat him like an adult and just talk to him. The more comfortable he feels around you, the better. Many of us got sick of our parents at that age (I moved out the week after I turned 18 - nobody expected it), but I figured out later when I lived with another adult who treated me almost like I'd imagine a really good boss would, ala, "everyone keeps the house clean, if I ask you to do something it's because I've already done something today and I know you've seen it and not done anything about it. I get it, nobody wants to do this stuff - but I work 8 hours a day, 7 days a week and I hate it too, but it's easier on both of us if we work together".
Get him to participate in more around the house stuff, cooking is good, help with your taxes if he's interested (then hopefully exploit that for the next 30 years). Repairing stuff. Don't tell, ask - reward.
On the social side, go to meetups or clubs in things you've found interesting together, ask him for help finding them. I get people say kids should be around people their own age, and generally speaking I think they should, but I look back and at that time I just wanted to do stuff that interested me. Unfortunately none of my friends from school had similar interests - so I found that escape through work and online.
I'm glad I forced myself to hang with my friends then since we still keep in touch, but there's opportunities all through his 20s (and especially university, send him to student living spaces) to build relationships with people his own age. I do regret however, forcing myself into relationships just because it was "what was expected of me".
Plenty of people live lives that are considered "the norm", parents hope their children follow similar paths they did. But sometime we don't. And that's OK, so long as we're happy. So concentrate on that.
As someone who went through prolonged depression and still barely keeping it at bay, I sometimes get worried sick what I would do if my own (future) kids go through the same.
Looking back, my parents were just too busy and struggling on their own so were just late in trying to help me.
I mean, there is no way to know about what is happening in people's heads, so you may well have made the correct choice - however when I was 16-17, I played online games a fair bit and the reason for it was because I enjoyed them a lot and had friends on there I didn't have in real life.
When I went to uni I met similar friends which led to my social life improving, but before then there really was no substitute for online games at the time simply because I did not enjoy the company of the people I'd met at the time.
When I didn't have access to online games I'd just read the same amount instead.
I guess what I'm saying is that a lot of the time (but not always), online games are a symptom, not a cause.
Yeah, same for me. I played team sports until 18 or so all year but also found a great virtual friends playing MUDs and going on BBs and mailing lists centered around subjects that I was interested in. Really opened my eyes to a wider world. Then had a chance to strap on a backpack and go explore it. It's actually nice for an introvert - you can be of the world but still anonymous, engaging with other people when you want, withdrawing to read or re-energize when you don't.
When I was around that age I also had my PC taken away from me. My recommendation would be to see if you can kickstart some hobby by spending a few hundred dollars on something as a substitute for the PC. Something of his choice than is more constructive than video games. When my PC was taken away and not replaced with anything, I just got bored and didn't know what to do with my time.
I've been thinking that possibly that is part of the problem. Kids don't experience being bored anymore, and working out ways to deal with a lack of constant entertainment/stimulation.
When I was a teenager I was frequently bored. Nothing on TV (we only had a few channels), no mobile phones, SMS, or online social media. You could call a friend on the telephone, maybe, if they were home and their phone wasn't busy. Once you were old enough to drive, and assuming you had access to a car, your options opened up a bit but meeting friends still took some planning.
I have teens now, and I can literally not remember the last time I heard the "I'm bored" whinging that my parents heard so often. They are never bored. They always have their phones, with games and connections to friends. I don't know if that's good or bad.
My parents also missed tons of opportunities to help me start other hobbies such as learning to play a instrument which I would have loved.
So I stayed with the PC...lots of gaming initially, which lead to learning about hardware and how to build computers myself (gotta overclock that CPU)...but I also have to admit that it sparked the interest to make my own games early which led me to pick up programming and that opened up a ocean of opportunities later in life.
It’s really hard to know what skill will be useful later in life...so now that I have kids in my own I try to support their natural interests which also allows my wife and I to moderate thins like gaming to some reasonable degree.
Where's my 34" irrevokable longboard smartphone I was promised, I might ask first. Or where are the desktop CPUs with fewer than 5-ring security please, without mentioning Intel Atom.
This is the time period when encouraging people to go out coincided with being aware that meningitis and melinoma must be checked out by someone whose credentials would naturally be beyond all rapportage! Then Zika. And then don't go inside if the people there travel where long-capsid viruses are common; and the TSA would like to weigh in as a completely discredited agency which will be continuing thanks. Oh and no reason, but health premiums are a thing that mean to dominate now and if you work outside you can be fired for asking about health guidance. Primaries in the US; anyone, how's your favorite Third Party holding up?
Great, great; now tell me just the good things about jurisprudence and family pride in Latin America; Canada if you like.
Few people realize how unprepared parents/authority figures are, "to do the right thing".
And that includes the characters who are educated and aware. God knows what's happening in households with unmonitored 24*7 sewage being pumped into developing minds.
Once your kid has had his or her mind misguided during crucial periods of its development, reprogramming it, postfacto is on par with rehabilitating the severely disabled. It takes a huge effort on all sides.
When it comes to mental health and development, the instinctive thing to do is not always the right thing. And it's even harder to do after things go wrong. So take it seriously. Keep talking to experts and other families going through the same thing. Stay on his case.
And lastly don't expect the govt or sillicon valleys shitheads (who produced this environment) to act fast.
> What works for now is to participate in his life with him.
Kudos to you for figuring this out. Taking the screen away without providing alternatives doesn't seem very helpful. Even if we accept the thesis that online interaction isn't deep or satisfying enough, replacing it with no interaction is still a step in the wrong direction. Anything that gets them to interact with peers or parents, be it sports or board games or shared craft projects or whatever, is going to be both more effective and easier to maintain over time.
P.S. Yes, this is even true for introverts. Even if interaction is draining and has to be limited, there's still a difference between low-quality vs. high-quality interaction.
What he needs is a good set of friends. Not just acquaintances who he sees during an event (like say volleyball) and never again, but a couple friends(or atleast one) who with whom he feels like he can hangout with all day, year round. That'll help greatly with the depression. Even if they stare at a screen, they'll do it together. I speak from experience.
Now how you can help him get a couple good friends, I don't know. It is something that has to happen very organically. Forcing it won't help in most cases (you'll know within a couple interactions). Don't try to push him to events he doesn't want to do. You can be around hundreds of people and still be lonely.
Rather than taking his PC away, you might consider moving it into a shared area of the house and setting a curfew on it. My own experience with depression has led me to believe that some of it is caused by light-exposure and stimulation before sleep and that having a device-free wind-down period can help.
If the final 2 hrs before sleep were a time for non-screen activities (reading, board games or just general family talk), that might be a good compromise between letting him keep it and taking it away entirely.
I have no advice, but you have both my sympathy and respect. Seriously good job looking after your boy! If you ever need someone to talk to/get a pat on the back from, my email is on my profile.
When I was 17, I spent the entire year playing Leaugue of Legends, I wasn't on a good period of my life, but league helped me cope.
I think that taking it away from me would have made things worse instead of me suddenly becoming very good socially. Next year, I went to college, met new people and stopped caring about League.
Not as much as LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a fairytale-land for adults, and it's bizzare (to me) that anyone wants to participate. It's not even humblebragging anymore. It's "Look what I made, and what I achieved" packed into casual "Oh this thing? Yeah it's just my perfect life"-packages...
Why would anyone browse LinkedIn? This is actually a serious question. I'm pretty good about keeping mine updated, but the only viewers I'm planning on are recruiters, who would be getting the same information regardless.
I don't know exactly why I do that. But every few weeks I login and browse through 100s of profiles starting with people I know, to suggestions I may know and then acquaintances of acquaintance and so on. I guess it is a mix of gossip and research for my personal consumption.
That's ironic. To me, the implication of browsing LinkedIn at work is that you're looking for another job. Whereas if you're browsing Facebook or Instagram you're just wasting time.
That's how I've seen it, definitely. At my old job it was at the point where you could tell who was pissed off at what time by seeing who'd been working on their LinkedIn profile... and after a company-wide announcement, everyone would update within a day or two.
It's a good place to share information I guess. I would've liked it to be a bit more academic if I were to browse it more often. If you work in consulting etc., it's also a nice place to get updates on what people are doing, because everyone (over)shares so much.
I think some people that just treat it like another Facebook. I've had several of people I barely know, and who I have nothing professionally in common with, try to add me.
There’s two metrics for dick-measuring contests, size of network and quality of network. Linkedin is there to show, yeah I’m a badass who got the <insert big shot here> to link to me, or look at me, I have lots of cards.
There is some actual stuff happening there, but the bread and circus that brings the crowd are those two metrics.
LinkedIn network size is almost treated as a binary big/little category to recruiters, because after 500 connections it just shows "500+" instead of the actual number of connections.
So a recruiter sees "500+ connections" and thinks, "this person is serious about [finding a job/networking with professionals/staying connected with colleagues]," or the recruiter sees "79 connections" and thinks, "this person is only on LinkedIn as a formality."
It's not really something to brag about and if you're a perfect fit for a job I doubt your network size will keep you from getting hired (unless you are in a social-heavy career like marketing). But, if you've got 475 connections it's probably worth it to send out 26 more random connection requests to get past past 500 and into that space where the recruiter doesn't know exactly how big your network is.
I found it a great resource to reach out and break into the tech sector. It only becomes a dick measuring contest when you've no clear goal on the platform.
How do you do that? I get bombarded with recruiters who don’t read my profile.
“I’m moving to Berlin because of Brexit and looking for iOS roles” -> “Would you like this job in London as a python developer?”
(Given I’m now back in the UK helping family look after a parent with Alzheimer’s while she can still recognise me, I should probably update my profile...)
It's really just a special case of the general spam problem. It costs recruiters very little to send out their listing to as many people as possible. People who are unqualified or uninterested in the specific job, or not looking, will typically just not respond. All the recruiters need to do is filter the dunning-krueger responses, pass along a hoard of largely self-filtered candidates to the hiring manager, and try to collect a paycheck.
The only real solution is to somehow make the cost of contact more expensive. I'm not sure of any way to do that other than simply trying to convince enough people to waste enough recruiter time collectively to make the dragnet approach unprofitable. And to be honest, given the churn in the industry, it might be unprofitable anyway- but there are always hoards of new graduates ever year without any particular marketable skills looking to leech onto the industry who become recruiters only to burn out after a few years anyway.
I hate to point this out, but Germany's government collapsed last year essentially because there's no consensus there for Merkle's ultra-pro-EU ultra-pro-migrant policies. She's still struggling to form a coalition months later. This is by far the longest German government collapse in history.
So if you think Germany is going to be radically different to the UK, I would suggest thinking again. Anti EU sentiment is rising everywhere.
1) All the main German federal parties support the EU.
2) The migration concerns are about asylum seekers rather than EU citizens, because (as I have discovered by trying) German bureaucracy is effective at keeping out speculative job seekers like me.
3) The UK government keeps passing surveillance laws which violate the UK implementation of the European declaration of human rights, and I don’t like that the UK will start getting away with it after they leave the relevant jurisdiction.
4) The UK government has no agreement amongst its own ministers about the strategic goals for Brexit, let alone figured out the relative costs and benefits of different ways to approach it, let alone made preparations for it.
I don’t mean small things either, May said the UK would leave the Customs Union but the Treasury doesn’t want to and nobody has even submitted planning permission for building new customs inspections points.
3 and 4 are the big problems for me. Personally staying in the EU is merely desirable, not Earth-shatteringly vital.
What do you mean by "main"? The third largest party in Germany wants to leave the euro. That's why the government collapsed - their new electoral success. Is third largest party not "main"?
W.R.T. surveillance, yes that sucks, but spy agencies have never been accountable to the law in any country as far as I can tell. German BND is exactly the same:
To the extent that they're less effective than GCHQ this reflects maybe a smaller budget or less capable employees, rather than major difference in intent. BND certainly doesn't care about EU human rights law any more than other countries do.
With respect to (4), the EU has no agreement amongst its own leaders about the strategic goals for Brexit either. Merkle and Macron want to exploit it to massively deepen integration, but Merkle is now longer chancellor and there's no clear consensus in Germany for that. Netherlands, Finland, other countries don't want deeper integration. Eastern European countries are busy fighting the commission and want deep relations with the UK after leaving. But the EU can't stop attempting to cherry-pick: the very thing it criticizes the UK for. The only deal it's been able to propose is all the bits the EU wants and none of the things the UK wants, steadily increasing the chance of no deal at all. And that's about 10% of the mess.
The reason Brexit is proving difficult to handle smoothly is because the EU and its loyalists really struggle with the idea of compromise, and extremism always divides people - go watch Darkest Hour and see how even in the face of a far, far, far worse and clearer adversary than Michel Barnier the British government was still split down the middle between "go it alone and fight" vs "appease and hope for the best". No big surprise that the same "give them whatever they want" vs "walk away" tension can be seen now too. That's democratic governments for you.
I’m on a phone so this is only going to be a limited reply:
“Main” - literally all other parties with seats have refused to be in a coalition with AfD. Also, unless they’ve changed position since I last looked (they might, as I don’t look at them often), they are currently anti-€ rather than anti-EU.
Further, the EU’s strategic goals from Brexit is damage limitation and clear resolution. I think you’re mixing up their goal for Brexit itself with the potential post-Brexit futures for the EU, which I think they should be considering about now-ish.
As for the EU’s attitude to compromise, I wish to point out that not only did the EU compromise on budget contributions with Thatcher; not only did Cameron get compromises from the EU right before the referendum; not only did the EU compromise and allow opt-outs on the Euro, Schengen, defence (Denmark’s the only one who wanted that), partial opt-outs of the charter of fundamental rights (“lol” UK and Poland), and something I don’t understand beyond guessing from the name called “area of freedom, security and justice”; in addition to all that, the _point_ of the EU is compromise between member states.
> The third largest party in Germany wants to leave the euro
I presume they feel they have to leave the euro before there is an option of leaving the EU.
It's true that other parties refuse to be in coalition with the AfD. This is a bad move on their part. It doesn't make them not a main party though. Especially because the other parties have also been refusing to be in coalitions with each other too.
Right now German politics is the most disastrous in Europe - all the political leaders hate each other, all have publicly trashed each other, all have been refusing to work together and yet Merkel and her buddies continue to rule as if nothing had happened. It's taking months to form a government because they're trying to figure out which party-destroying, soul-sucking coalition is least unacceptable to them and the voters.
We will have to disagree on the EU's approach to compromise. Yes, it compromised with Thatcher back in the 1980's but that was a different time. The EU was much smaller and its institutions felt much less powerful, so compromise and teamwork was much more important back then. As the EU has grown so have its ambitions and the character of the project has changed. The modern EU is not the same organisation that Thatcher dealt with.
That can be seen in recent events. Cameron was given nothing at all and told to pretend it was some massive sacrifice by other leaders. The British public easily saw through that instantly which is why virtually nobody in the remain campaign referred to his "deal" ever again. A compromise would have been the UK suspending unlimited immigration from the EU. It was made clear that such a thing was never going to be on offer and they thought it was insane to even ask.
As for the opt-outs ... good luck keeping them in the event of a remain vote! The EU sees "opt outs" as some horrible nasty legacy thing that they regret ever happened, not as a basic part of negotiation. Even their phrasing shows what they truly think: Germany and Germans like to refer to them as "special privileges"! I have German friends and debated Brexit with one of them once, that's how she called them and I'm not surprised, they call it "extrawürst" in their language - extra sausage. Deep down Germans know that the EU is an undesirable future, but feel they have to suffer through it anyway for the greater good (elimination of Germany as a country and transference of German pride to Europe, a new country free of the horrible history of their own).
Maybe they are guessing that you might not have updated your profile, when they recruit you inaccurately. (More realistically, they have a quota to fill...)
It’s amazing how many people have a “Senior” prefix that I don’t remember from when I worked with them... or are claiming sole responsibility for a team or even a different team’s project... There is also a trick used by people who attended college but never graduated, list the years and the subject and leave the reader to fill in the blanks, not technically lying but...
The average LinkedIn profile is just if not more fictitious than Facebook. And everyone knows it but plays along anyway.
The worst thing about LinkedIn is the guys who think it is a dating site. I have completely stopped replying to "recruiters" who contact me on LinkedIn. I still keep it updated though.
It's not the same. LinkedIn is a network for recruiters, job-seekers, execs and folks from biz-dev and sales. They dynamics are different. It's very work oriented.
There should be a health warning to the effect of: “Objects seen on instagram are faker than they appear.”
They may be beautiful, they may be on a yacht - but the thing has been chartered for an hour for an instagram shoot, they’re staying in a backpacker’s hostel, that methuselah of champagne was bought empty and filled with water, and they’re not actually called Montague Herostache, but rather Duane Dibbley. It’s all artifice.
Source: I watched gaggles of instagrammers faking the lifestyle at Royal Phuket Marina during a yacht show last year, paying to pose on megayachts. It was rather sad - like caged birds primping their plumage.
Exactly. I've carefully tailored my feed so it provides me with a huge amount of dog photos. Now every time I get on there my mood is usually boosted seeing cute dog photos and videos.
100% agree with this, as do several of my friends. Curated correctly (pretty easy to do), Instagram becomes a place of respite and solace.
And for some, a pleasant peaceful channel before going to sleep for the night. Kind of ironically :)
That's not using Instagram in general anymore though, that's heavily censoring Instagram towards very non-typical streams.
It's as if responding to someone that said that one can never find any positive stream on Instagram, when people actually complained about what Instagram, at its majority, and as is used by most, is.
Everyone's Instagram feed is different and that's by design. Everyone curates differently for themselves. I don't think the point you're making is really that strong.
Media broadly is what you make of it. Turn on the TV and flip to CNN, I'm sure you'll be depressed within a couple minutes. At some basic level the burden of information curation rests on you - the human. You can't keep blaming CNN, Instagram, Facebook, Buzzfeed, etc etc ad infinitum.
At some point you have to step back and take the responsibility of information intake into your own hands.
That's not to say you don't have a valid point. You absolutely do have a valid point. But it's not as useful of a point as you're suggesting imo.
How do you prevent yourself from thinking "how amazing their world is", or "how amazing my world could be but isn't"? Most people can change their thinking about this manually to some extent, but I can definitely see how it could be a big problem for a significant subset.
The things that bring most pleasure (family, friends, learning, creating and exercise) have nothing to do with any of the fake stuff on Instagram. I've been on yachts and frankly I was bored out of my mind and dying to leave.
No, you didn't understand. The point is that you should follow things that make you feel good and cut off access to things that make you feel bad. Choose your experience. Curate your feed. That's supposed to be the whole point.
It's like the difference between enjoying a glass of fine wine and alcoholic abuse that causes cirrhosis.
This is more complicated than you suggest. One toxic element of social media is that it's difficult to really notice these subtle effects. It's only in aggregate that the "bad" is really recognizable. E.g., on a surface level, it may feel enjoyable to view happy people living the good life, while subtle jealousy and a sense of inferiority may develop over longer lengths of time.
I find it "funny" that internet was to bring on us the infinity of information, only for it to be curated curated curated to make it relevant. Instead of having curated diffusion, we flipped the logic.
You've got to be a bit careful though. Top "influencers" hire food photographers for perfect shots, they'll pose casually in a $400 sweater etc. It's not a 100% true snapshot of real life.
Completely agree. I also believe that YouTube can have similar results. Kids watch videos of "professional" YouTubers having nice cars, traveling all the time, living in nice homes, etc... We have had to significantly limit the amount of time our kids are exposed to YouTube (and Instagram) simply because of the "I want it now" and "I want that one" mentality it has caused on some occasions.
Very true. Unfortunately, for kids/teens they tend to gravitate towards the "bad" content. I don't mean the content is necessarily by definition (i.e. r-rated or poor production quality), simply that it provides no value other than "look at me" and "see how I live" value to viewers.
I completely stopped browsing YouTube years ago and only visit it for specific songs/videos - the pervasiveness of the advertising/product placement is worse than broadcast TV.
This might have been on HN a while ago, but it talks about different social media sites and came to the conclusion that Instagram was the worst of them as far as this stuff goes.
Depends on who and what you're following, I guess. Being a male in my mid- to late-30s I don't use Instagram for social purposes, as I don't have any personal photo of mine in there, I'm just using it to post architecture-related photos (mostly photos of communist brutalist buildings built in my city in the 1960s and 1970s) and to follow people interested in very similar things. For purposes like this one is quite an interesting medium.
Depends on the person. I don't respond to material wealth, I would probably end up annoyed by their lifestyle more than anything else. Facebook and similar on other hand rubbed my lack of social skills wound so much I deleted it really long ago.
This is ridiculous. Depressed and filled with existential dread over seeing pictures of rich people on yachts, really? Do you feel that way every time you pass by a large house or see an expensive car on the road too?
As silly as it sounds, strangers on the road or houses you pass by aren't human
Social media / instagram / etc allow the other party to feel human to you, at which point you can easily get into the thought of "They're not really better than me, are they? Why is their life so gilded"..
I knew kids with huge houses and rich parents as a kid and I didn't feel more strongly about it than "this house/pool/whatever is pretty cool". Maybe "gee I wish I had every video game console too" at most. In high school too mosy people I knew were materially better off. It never gave me a complex about it. It's just life, almost everybody can find examples of people with more money.
It's not. It's just your daily anti-facebook/social media propaganda. Every day there is something about the "evils of social media".
It's the new gangsta rap or violent video games. The news media spreads fear in order to sell ads.
It wasn't too long ago when the news media hyped up violent videos to sell ads. Violent video games were blamed for everything from school shootings to depression to anti-social behavior and everything in between. It wasn't too long ago that gangsta rap had to have parental advisory notices.
I never bought into this argument that gangsta rap, violent video games, porn, etc have NO effect on our society.
You, yourself mentioned ads in your comment. What is an ad but a type of media? And yet, ads are so effective that they are basically the backbone of many of the largest tech companies in the world.
Clearly media DOES affect our society. It may not be as simple as "listen to gangsta rap -> commit the crimes you heard about in gangsta rap" but there can totally be changes in our behavior which come directly from our media. If this wasn't possible, advertising wouldn't be one of the largest industries in the world.
> I never bought into this argument that gangsta rap, violent video games, porn, etc have NO effect on our society.
I never argued that. So you are building a straw man. Of course everything has an "effect". But it didn't bring society down. That's the point. It isn't the cause of all of societies ills. If the media, people like you and others were right, then society would have collapsed a long time ago. It hasn't.
> You, yourself mentioned ads in your comment. What is an ad but a type of media? And yet, ads are so effective that they are basically the backbone of many of the largest tech companies in the world.
Sure. But ads are media specifically engineered to influence you in a particular manner. Gangsta rap, violent video games, porn, etc are meant to entertain. But I agree, all media influences.
> If this wasn't possible, advertising wouldn't be one of the largest industries in the world.
Once again, I'm not denying that media has influence. Advertising, news media, entertainment, movies, etc all influence to some degree. My point was about the scaremongering and scapegoating of certain things and how overblown it is and how people do it for money and influence.
It's not just material posessions that are flaunted on Instagram. Experiences, lifestyles, relationships, and accomplishments - most things that people want - are bubbled to the top.
I think the same can be applied to just about any source/site/app where these feelings of inferiority can arise. Even here if I spend enough time browsing posts with topics I’m not strong in, I feel like I still have so much catching up/learning to do in tech, and it kills me. Drawing comparisons is way too easy and it really is the devil.
>How is this any different than society at large? How is this any different from TV and newspapers?
I suppose social media like Instagram makes the experience different, more intimate perhaps. Reading newspaper accounts of super-rich lifestyle is still a bit like hearing tales of life of Kublai Khan: it's something that happens far away, half mythical and half magical. A magazine publishes an article how the super-rich enjoy their life, sailing around the world on their yachts? Maybe it was an overview of the phenomenon in general, or if it was an in-depth portrait focused on some particular celebrity, it probably was a story about what they did maybe weeks or months ago. And in any case, when you've read the article, you put the magazine away, and continue with your life.
Following people on the internet service, looking at the pictures and stories they personally share with their followers in near real time, it's a bit more like observing a person doing all those things on first hand basis. And that could make it more soul-crushing as an experience.
But this is all conjecture. Someone pointed out in other comment that the true reason might be the economic downturn.
This is anecdotal, but when I was a teen, I was bullied, and online was an escape. The idea of those bullies hitting up a Facebook, Instagram, or even just texting insults 24/7 would probably be jarring and depressing.
Yeah I was surprised they mentioned bullying in the article as a possible "real life" cause of depression, and not a "smartphone" one. Social media does make it easier for a bully to "connect" with you.
Teenagers get depressed when they are in love, their love is unrequited, and they are constantly reminded of that fact. Facebook facilitates all of these conditions. Why is love never mentioned in these studies as a primary motivator in teen suicide?
I'm not sure if it exists, but it would be a good idea to implement something like a temporary "ex block" for a whole device - everything posted by a specific person would be filtered out for you ON ALL platforms. You wouldn't see their facebook, instagram, twitter or any other profiles for a predetermined amount of time. I know it may approach a Black Mirror kind of vibe, but still...
This research is highly debated and is by no means a sure thing. The research so far has been correlational, inconsistent, and weak. Twenge
hugely overstates the confidence we should have in the findings.
When I worked for a research lab for a university attached to a hospital, facebook usage was highly correlated with diagnosed depression. it was unclear whether depressed people used facebook more, or using facebook more caused depression.
the correlations with facebook usage and other illnesses was weak, but depression was not.
Im sure smartphones could be a possible factor however one must not forget how depressing the whole high school experience is. I think that the pressure has increased quite a bit. The amount of hw has also increased.
I don’t think that this suicide increase has been observed in say Finland.
I wonder how much of it with smartphones and how much of it was cameraphones (which may or may not be smart).
When I was a kid you can make an idiot of yourself and nothing would happen. People would see and they may make fun of you, but that was it.
Now if you choose to make a fool of yourself (or do it accidentally) you may get your picture taken/video made and now there’s proof forever to show other people. And it can be posted online. Where people on Reddit or something else will vote it up and share it.
I imagine there’s a level of self censorship and self-consciousness the previous generations never had to apply to themselves. Having that kind of low level stress around all the time can’t be great.
And that’s not including any pressure to look GOOD on pictures taken of you/taken by you.
Well, remember that we're talking about an uptick. High school has always been soul-crushing for a certain percentage of the student body. The question isn't just what's wrong, but what's changed to make it worse?
i think the article is correct, but i also think that new perceptions about society are contributing to the problem. kids used to think that they could make ends meet, somehow. as time goes forward, that notion is increasingly replaced by the notion that there is no way to make ends meet or to have a good life besides succeeding in high school and then college and then in a fancy career. anything besides that is not really accepted or respected, from what ive seen. so imagine that you are a kid and you are in fact not up to the gauntlet of challenges associated with making all of that happen -- or imagine that taking on that huge challenge frightens you which causes you to do badly in school which then makes you even more frightened and hopeless. and you need to do all this while attending a public high school in the US, which are some of the most toxic, inhospitable and shortsighted places in the world.
the whole thing a stupid cultural artifact that not only makes no sense (the economy will not function if everyone has white-collar jobs), but also completely overlooks the mental health of the people who are subjected to it.
and its all made worse by social media, because kids know that if their life and career dont wind up being ideal, their entire social circle is going to be looking at it online.
i was in high school when facebook first took off. i suppose im lucky because i got to experience high school before facebook (before modern social media) and i got to experience high school after. such a transition happens once in a lifetime. i immediately had a very bad feeling about facebook and felt really bad whenever i used it. when i was faced with the transition to a facebook world, informed by the memory of how i felt before facebook, i chose not to make an account and effectively opt out of online social interaction. its a decision that i have never regretted and one that seems better and better as the years tick by.
i still cant understand why people use facebook. and im not surprised in any way that a world where everyone is on facebook has these kinds of consequences.
Is it possible this is also in part due to EMFs from their phones (and environment) and circadian rhythm disturbances from screens?
Some studies suggest the radiation can be risky to kids:
Christ A, Gosselin MC, Christopoulou M, K’uhn S, & Kuster N. (2010 Jan.). Age dependent tissue-specific exposure of cell phone users. Physics in Medicine and Biology, 55: 1767-1783. Retrieved from http://iopscience.iop.org/0031-9155/55/7/001/pdf/0031-9155_5....
Hardell L, Carlberg M, Hansson Mild K. (2009) Epidemiological evidence for an association between use of wireless phones an tumor diseases. Pathophysiology 16 (2-3): 113-122.]
Hardell L, Hansson Mild K, Carlberg M, Hallquist A. (2004) Cellular and cordless telephones and the association with brain tumours in different age group. Archives of Environmental Health 59 (3): 132-137.
Divan HA, Kheifets L, Obel C, Olsen J. (2008) Prenatal and Postnatal Exposure to Cell Phone Use and Behavioral Problems in Children. Epidemiology 19(4): 523-529.
Byun, YH, Ha, M, Kwon, HJ et al (2013 Mar 21). Mobile phone use, blood lead levels, and attention deficit hyperactivity symptoms in children: a longitudinal study. PLoS One. 2013;8(3):e59742. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0059742.
Morgan, L, Kesari, S, Davis, D (2014). Why children absorb more microwave radiation than adults: The consequences. Journal of Microscopy and Ultrastructure 2(4): 197-204. doi:10.1016/j.jmau.2014.06.005
Ah, whatdya know, I said the same thing a while ago - we don't actually know the effects of long term exposure to so much radiation.
But I think it's mostly the Internet - too much information, endless info streams, endless mindless entertainment, endless feeds of successful people (so it seems that everyone is successful, or making 50K/year, or pretty, except you and your family/friends/hometown).
Yes, that's the most overused argument. But the artificial radiation is on top of the natural one. I'm counting not only cell towers and Wifi, but power lines and transformers, and the infra and ultrasound all around us.
It's probably just a blip, though, and it's probably the always-connected aspect that has way more profound effects.
I can only say that a few days in the countryside without electricity was one of the most relaxing experiences ever.
Currently we're running a huge experiment in which virtually everybody is exposed to the electromagnetic fields of communication networks. This has been going on for more than a decade. If there is an effect, we should easily see it.
Note, I'm not saying there is an effect, but it's not quite so easy to say we should have found it if it exists. First, there is a delay between radiation exposure and cancer risk (up to ten years).
Second, if all population centers experience the same increase in radiation exposure, then it is very difficult to use radiation as an independent variable to measure its impact on cancer.
For instance, it took decades before anyone was able to show that nuclear testing caused an increase in deaths, and that was only possible because the distribution of radioactive isotopes was not uniformly spread across the US -- some states (especially in the midwest) received far more radiation than others (e.g. Western California or Louisiana).
In contrast, if electromagnetic radiation from cell towers is relatively uniformly spread for the same population density (e.g. New York is comparable to Los Angeles, and rural Washington is comparable to rural Missouri), then it will be rather difficult to separate cancer risk from electromagnetic radiation from other risks.
Non-ionizing radiation, like the one from cell towers or your smartphone (or radio signals, or TV, or even from power lines) does not cause cancer. It just can't cause cancer, as it can't even rip off a single electron from an atom (definition of non-ionizing).
This seems like a very wrong-headed assumption. We don't understand the etiology of cancer generally, and radio frequency radiation may have physiological effects which produce conditions favorable to cancer. Microwaves aren't ionizing, but it's easy to demonstrate that an oven will damage tissue. Tissue damage results in a cascade of physiological processes, including inflammation and scarring which may precipitate cancer. RF energy is similarly absorbed by tissue producing heat, but the specific absorption rate (SAR) for common RF emitters, including phones, is low. Maybe enough exposure over time becomes an issue, though.
An oven will damage tissue by thermal heating. Since the energies involved in cell phones, WiFi, etc. induce negligible heating, we need another plausible pathway of interaction with the tissue. If we don't have one, then it's like saying that african butterflies could cause cancer at the North Pole by an yet unidentified phenomenon of spooky action at a distance. Impossible to disprove but irrelevant.
Edit: To make matters worse, there is even a profesional disease among people with RF exposure: eye cataract, due to thermal heating of a poorly irrigated and termoregulated corneal tissue. These are guys working in close proximity to megawatt transmitters. It is not correlated to cancers.
Heating was an example to demonstrate that non-ionizing radiation still impacts tissue. It doesn't make sense to dismiss a possible link between cancer and RF emitting devices just because we don't understand all the mediating mechanisms in that relationship. A lack of understanding is not negative evidence. And the fact that I can't disprove your butterfly theory is not a reason that simpler theories (phone usage ~ cancer) are invalid.
> A lack of understanding is not negative evidence
Clearly, but anybody claiming the spooky action effect needs to accept the burden of proof and produce positive evidence. When that necessitates new ways of physical interaction unknown to science, it's a colossal burden, likely to have far reaching implications and revolutionize multiple fields; it's highly unlikely that such positive evidence was ignored for the decades the effect was claimed.
That's technically not correct, since RF-induced tissue heating can absolutely cause all sorts of cell damage. As far as I know there have been some indicators that cancer can be caused by RF tissue heating.
However, the field strength generated by everyday devices are regulated to levels that are thought not to generate a relevant heating effect in typical use.
Additionally, looking at your phone means it is an appreciable distance away from the brain, unlike using a phone as a phone.
More than a decade. A century. We've been steadily increasing the number of RF sources, but also at the same time, reducing their intensity. RF noise is weaker now than it used to be.
Areas that were late in getting accesd to power grid, radio stations, landlines, analog TV... This "experiment" has been running for a good century now, and we would have seen effects if they were strong...
We may be able to draw a correlation with pre television era and an introduction to television — for cardiac rhythm and mindlessness entertainment effects among others.
The existential challenge for most teens is "Do I belong with peers?" I had a hard enough time with that, with only a few hundred schoolmates. I can't quite imagine how tough that must be on social media today. Bullying and mobbing are just so much more efficient.
I suppose that one could argue that's it's just stronger selective pressure for toughness. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." But now, words can hurt. Can destroy your life. Or so it seems. And what about the ones who survive? What sort of society will they create? I have no clue.
Maybe we should manage social media like psychoactive drugs.
> Bullying and mobbing are just so much more efficient.
That's a deeply insightful observation that should be centerpiece in this conversation. As others have pointed out it's clearly not "screen time", and if the effect is real, it's related to social media, not screens. My happiest days were spending 10+ hours on my Sinclair Spectrum clone, the screen certainly made me feel more capable and confident in my abilities than school work or social interaction.
Yet, my social interactions were moderated by the constraints of real life, that strongly dampen agresive tendencies. I can imagine in terror what it means to be a withdrawn teenager now: technology permits cutthroat exclusion of the undesirables while ridicule is instantaneous and viral.
Teen suicide isn't going up in Europe generally or specifically in the UK.
It seems more likely to me that the uptick is due to a 2004 FDA black-box warning on antidepressants indicating that they were associated with an increased risk of suicidal thinking, feeling, and behavior in young people. It seems likely that prescriptions for antidepressants would go down and people avoiding taking their antidepressants would go up a few years after the warning.
Housing market is pretty bad factor. Most generations previous could afford a starter house on two minimum wage or a bit above minimum wage incomes. In many areas today you need two engineering incomes to pay off a 30 yr mortgage.
No, there are a near-zero number of 13-17 year olds worried about how they’re going to pay their rent when they graduate from college. Those that do generally see things through the optimism of youth and assume everything will work out.
I agree, but maybe we're projecting? We didn't have to think about it, it was a given that we'd move out and rent somewhere and eventually buy a home, only for the poorest in society would this be unattainable and much of the rest would be covered by social housing projects.
Many people in their 30's and 40's are now finding out that this isn't the case and it's talked about a lot, so teenagers are more likely aware. There's also a better chance that they're coming from a family that has never owned a home.
My wife moved away from Long Island because it’s definitely true there. All her friends that stayed are either just now getting married and buying a house and have finance or other professional jobs (at 31-32), or live with their parents.
I feel like a broken record but in a place like Kansas City (where I live) you can easily get a mortgage on a house if you make $40,000 a year.
tl:dr correlation between them all getting mobile phones and facebook. Perhaps because of the need to reduce it to six paragraphs, it is a very unconvincing piece.
I don't think that's a reasonable summation, there is a correlation between mobile phone use while there are other studies showing teens assigned to use less of Facebook are more happy. The author could not find movement in other variables that could account for this change, although of course that does not prove that they don't exist (she only mentions homework and economic growth). It's obviously not definitive and she acknowledges this, but it is striking nonetheless.
I've got a plausible (to me) hypothesis of my own - namely, that the "kids these days are getting worse and worse" is something people have been thoughtlessly regurgitating for as long as we have historical written records, and that new customs or technologies are easiest to blame. Today it's Facebook, previously it was TV, earlier still it was walkmans and metal bands. Hell, if I'm to believe random quotes from the Internet, even earlier it was paper/pens and... books. "Facebook is bad for the kids" seems to be the cheapest thing you can write these days while being sure you'll have an audience that agrees with you.
I think there is actually a bigger danger with people summarily dismissing negative consequences of technology, and then just saying "it's no big deal" because it's been going on a long time.
Look at TV. Of course TV has many positives, but it's also another factor in people (at least Americans) becoming much more sedentary over the past 6-7 decades, which has been a large factor in the US obesity epidemic. It's a mistake to dismiss the negatives of TV just because we've gotten used to the fact that nearly everyone is so fat.
Similarly, with social media, forget about teenagers, as I think many people are able to see the huge negative effect it has on their own lives. The fact that we're becoming a society that constantly compares ourselves to the idealized versions of other people shouldn't allow us to dismiss the obvious negatives of those comparisons.
Not trying to dismiss all negatives; just biased against this particular flavour (kids getting sad or unruly is surely because of the things they enjoy, as opposed to e.g. broken economy visible every day through their parents). So I'm not dismissing e.g. sedentary lifestyle issues.
> The fact that we're becoming a society that constantly compares ourselves to the idealized versions of other people shouldn't allow us to dismiss the obvious negatives of those comparisons
I think social media is actually a step up here - the time spent comparing ourselves to idealized versions of our friends is the time not spent comparing ourselves to the apparent presence of all those celebrities and rich people, which was a constant of the previous century. Mass media broke the availability heuristic; the generic dysrationalia it caused in people is clearly visible. Which would be a kind of tech negative I'm not denying.
They are not "thoughtlessly regurgitating" anything. Depression and suicide rates have risen significantly, and they are putting some effort into identifying the cause. This is stated explicitly in the introduction to the article.
I think a big difference is social media causes people to constantly compare their lives to people's Facebook posts, which are usually people just sharing stuff that makes them look like their life is amazing. I know when I was in high school I compared myself to others and felt inadequate even without Facebook in my pocket. Now kids can just mindlessly scroll through a highlight reel of their peers and feel inadequate wherever they are.
Walkmans and metal bands came after TV. In fact so did miniskirts and the Beatles, each of which were also decried as the end of civilization in their turn.
Nonetheless, just because people have been saying "the world's going down the shitter" for a long time, doesn't mean it's not.
Did you read the article? Or even the post title? No one is talking about kids getting "worse", they're talking about trying to explain an uptick in things like suicide.
Weird that they so often write "screen" when they mean "social media". My eyes were glued to screens growing up. TV, PC, GameBoy, consoles. But his is only happening now.
I find it interesting the article doesn't talk about physical health. Many of the mental health drugs cause extreme weight gain which can lead to depression.
While the unemployment rate may have "improved" it doesn't track people "leaving the workforce " due to giving up or running out of benefits. It was a considered a somewhat jobless recovery actually. With regards to smartphones "correlation does not imply causation." Needless to say I only read the first few paragraphs before determining this wasn't a well reasoned article.
Let's look at the OECD stats for teenage suicide worldwide:
> Teenage suicides rates have, on average, declined slightly over the past two decades or so (Chart CO4.4.A). While in 1990 there were, on average across the OECD, 8.5 suicides per 100 000 teenagers (15-19), by 2015 this rate had fallen to 7.4. Much of this decline occurred during the 2000s. Between 1990 and 1999 the OECD average teenage suicide remained fairly stable at around 8.4 suicides per 100,000, but this average fell across the 2000s before reaching a low of 6.3 per 100,000 in 2007. With the exception of 2008, the average rate remained lower than 7.0 until 2014, although it increased slightly in 2014 and 2015.
Subtle accumulative micro attention brain hijacking that turns into detrimental habits. Overtime, it can be catastrophic. Perhaps it's less than 50 percent, but it's happening in a massive scale, so the actual number can be staggering.
They took the results of a survey administered 6 years apart and applied their pet theory to interpret the differences.
The survey is done every 2 years by the CDC, so their findings have a prima facie lack if rigorous credibiltlity by ignoring the 2 administrations in 2011 and 2013.
Would anyone with actual children who are living in the smartphone era care to comment? Blanketing "access to information leads to nihilism" removes social exclusion, FOMO, cyber-bullying, etc. from the conversation, imo.
> For example, while conducting research for my book on iGen, I found that teens now spend much less time interacting with their friends in person. Interacting with people face to face is one of the deepest wellsprings of human happiness; without it, our moods start to suffer and depression often follows.
I think this is really the key. The lack of face time is really hard. Social media is a poor replacement for real interaction. It's kind of like junk food. It makes you feel good for a bit but long term use leaves you sick and fat. You get too much of the stuff you don't need and too little of the stuff you do need.
> Interacting with people face to face is one of the deepest wellsprings of human happiness;
That varies from person to person. There are enough introverts around who are completely drained by excess human interactions and need time to process and recharge. As a blanket statement this is very misleading.
For those who tend more extroverted, it’s likely very true, but doesn’t make it true for everyone.
Introvert here. It took me a long time to realise the role that face to face interaction had in my emotional well being. I was awkwardly shy and confused by most social interaction. I'd also get down a lot.
Over time I learnt that I'd feel better if I made the effort to spend time around people and develop relationships. I'm still not great at this and would like to get better. But it's kind of like exercise yeah some people naturally enjoy it and some hate it but most will feel better for it.
Perhaps this is not true of everyone. But I'd be surprised if it wasn't true for a very significant proportion of the population.
How can the author look at something as broad as ‘access to a smartphone’ and not dive deeper? What are these kids doing on that phone that’s making them miserable? I have my suspicions, and it’s not candy crush...
There's a lot of discussion with social media in regards to the impact of mobile devices on children, but I think the easy access to internet porn is arguably just as harmful. There are teen boys with erectile dysfunction because of this. I wouldn't be surprised if it had broader negative psychological and social effects as well. At the same time, I don't think we really have enough information about what the impacts of this really are. I hope some more research is done on this topic.
It's very interesting to me to see the attack on the article/research and the defense of the screen here. Reminds me very much of client change deniers.
Obviously just a sample size of 1, but I -- a teenager -- am the only one out of all my friends that isn't depressed, and I'm fairly sure I spend more time on the computer/phone than all of them. Not to imply that the conclusion is wrong, I could just be an outlier, but it's likely just a rule of thumb when attempting to diagnose/identify potential causes of a problem.
Too quick to blame, "the screen". Is it really just the existence of social media that caused this, or is it maybe a change of culture that emerged with the spread of the Internet and social media?
For example, today a child from a religious community might encounter atheism at 12 or 13 whereas previously they would encounter it when they went off to college. Maybe that child happens to be suffering from depression and their faith would have provided them with the hope that they needed to persevere, but having discovered atheism at such a tender age, they are left hopeless and desolate. Not mature enough to deal with their problems on their own and with no reason to believe that things will get any better.
I am not saying that the rise of atheism is a factor. It is just one example I came up with, on the spot, to explain how the change of culture due to the Internet might be the actual cause powering this trend, rather than the usage of the social media itself.
I find your example is extremely odd and disturbing. Facing other mindsets and cultures at a young age as a reason, or at least contributing, to depression? That's really a stretch.
Are children also at risk when meeting with other kids of different religions? It could shake their own faith too, by the same logic.
> Facing other mindsets and cultures at a young age as a reason, or at least contributing, to depression? That's really a stretch.
I can see it contributing. Humans are tribal animals and teenagers are the extreme of this with all sorts of cliques and clubs that form in high schools. Imagine being a teenager and discovering that your in the wrong tribe, then imagine that the tribe you like is "at war" with your tribe. Even with modern communications it would be easy to feel isolated without that face to face interaction.
Facing other mindsets and cultures is wholly different in real life versus solely online.
Why do you think racism / anti-Semitism / anti-Muslim sentiment is so prominent online and so much less prominent in real life? Why does so much research show that actual, in-person interactions with people of other backgrounds reduces the strength of racist stereotypes in people's minds?
> Why do you think racism / anti-Semitism / anti-Muslim sentiment is so prominent online and so much less prominent in real life?
Mainly because speech isn't regulated online, and there's little to no repercussions when going beyond what's acceptable in "real life". Online discourse has become a way to show what's behind the facade that many feel forced to adopt when talking face to face. Basically there's less hypocrisy online, at least for a vocal minority, for good or bad.
> Why does so much research show that actual, in-person interactions with people of other backgrounds reduces the strength of racist stereotypes in people's minds?
That's the Intergroup Contact Theory. But I still don't see why it's useful to explain an increase in depression in young people. The primary "tribe" of a kid is close family, anyone else beyond is an outsider: they have different values and perspectives; even your neighbour may be of a different religion, another race, another economical class, etc... Meeting this otherness is simply life and unavoidable. Online social life just displays this otherness in a harsher light, the extremes are more apparent.
Or are you proposing that we should lock up kids in their house for fear of their minds not being able to cope with what's outside? I'd argue that this overprotective mindset might actually be one of the reasons kids are more prone to depression these days, similar to how allergies are more prominent because we are less exposed to normal pathogens in early childhood. Kids falling back on online activities may be merely a side-effect of this, not the real cause of their anxiety/depression.
> having discovered atheism at such a tender age, they are left hopeless and desolate.
(emphasis mine)
What??
As if atheists were monsters.
As an atheist (more agnostic actually - I cannot be sure no gods exist), your answer feels interesting but also surprising, very saddening and actually chocking.
Let's not make atheists look like evil people who make children depressed. This is not OK.
I never needed to have any "faith" to be happy. Solving my problems actually seems to be the solution to my happiness, not to believe or have faith in anything. On the other side, a big part of many religions seems to involve thinking about death and guilt. This can seem depressing and desolating from the point of view of an atheist. Can you imagine an atheist child being exposed to such a desolating way of seeing life? What happens when this child learns that there have been wars about such things as religions when the claim is that they are about tolerence? The child have rights to feel outright disoriented (guess what: I have been such a child).
Fortunately, one people I know is very positive in their life (the most by far) and also happens to be a believer, and most people (including believers) I know are fine people and against wars, so I understand that believers do not have to approach religions like this.
Anyway, though your example is insightful and enlightening, you could have made your point with a way better example. Or your point was the wrong one.
Perhaps the original post was not saying atheists are monsters but to encounter a massive challenge to their world view at a young age, may disrupt the comfort of children? Children are wrapped in the bubble of comfort by the boundaries they're raised in. When you mature you question those boundaries and find your own way in the world. But during your early years you may lack the maturity to challenge the foundation of your world view. Being exposed to other ways of thinking may lead to anxiety. It's only a recent thing that people have been so easily exposed to ideas from outside of the creed they were raised in.
But I don't really know, just playing the devils advocate.
>Let's not make atheists look like evil people who make children depressed. This is not OK.
That's not what he's doing at all.
But it is also true that religion is largely the underpinning of morality for most people in the world and early exposure to the idea that morality is relative and malleable and that actually the only real motivator is self-preservation is probably unhealthy for adolescents.
>Solving my problems actually seems to be the solution to my happiness, not to believe or have faith in anything. On the other side, a big part of many religions seems to involve thinking about death and guilt
A big part of religions is also charity work and the idea that you aren't just doing things for yourself or solving your own problems but solving the problems of others because they are your equals (at least in Abrahamic traditions, I am familiar with these).
I don't see where you can pull that out of atheism.
>What happens when this child learns that there have been wars about such things as religions when the claim is that they are about tolerence?
What a silly thing to say. Religions would not need to preach tolerance if mankind were inherently tolerant, no? If mankind is not inherently tolerant, why will a child be shaken to understand that that inherent intolerance causes wars over nearly everything (from religion to culture to language to land).
> the idea that you aren't just doing things for yourself or solving your own problems but solving the problems of others because they are your equals
Equality really really does not describe views of hardcore christians I personally know nor the content of sermons I personally heard not christian journals articles I read.
Nor does tolerance, no matter how you define tolerance.
I am not a Christian but I grew up around very faithful Christians and my experiences are not the same as yours. Just to put that out there. Many of the devout Christians I knew took actions to rectify the wrongs around them that people would be awed by.
Parts of my problems are others problems, that is not mutually exclusive.
Actually, one could argue that at the end of the day, any action is egoist at some level, even charity (my experience is that this argument leads to interesting discussions were people try to define things).
Also, I know that religion is linked to charity, but I don't see why would one need religion to help other people. I'm doing it pretty often actually, at my level.
Why should I need faith in anything to help someone? How an atheist would be unable to help anybody?
So,
> I don't see where you can pull that out of atheism.
I would say that beliefs (atheism is a form of belief, for some definition of atheism) and helping people are orthogonal notions. As an agnostic, linking those things feel absurd (in the mathematical definition of absurd, not in the definition of "stupid").
P.S.: I don't feel I said anything stupid. Let's use real arguments. If you think I said something wrong, feel free to argue about it. I'll be glad to recognize that I was wrong or to further argue.
Edit: I would say that one acts according to what drives their life. This can be faith. Or something else. Or a mix of things.
>As an agnostic, linking those things feel absurd (in the mathematical definition of absurd, not in the definition of "stupid").
It's hard for me to reply to this because I just have a hard time understanding what you are talking about. What is the mathematical definition of absurd? What is an "egoist" action.
All I was able to really understand was that you don't see why you need religion to help people. You don't. But every religious person can be reprimainded for not helping people because it is a religious tenet of nearly every major faith to help others as they are your equals under God. Every atheist cannot be taught to help others in this way.
In essence, an atheist can be good if they choose to be. A religious person is specifically being told to be good.
I think you're taking it the wrong way. Perhaps they feel hopeless and desolate because they are stuck in the religious group after learning about other things.
(edit: I read your answer again. It made me smile. Original text:)
Maybe you are right, and xupybd too. This is why I still think my parent had an interesting and insightful answer. I actually wanted to understand that this way, but was put off by the "at such a tender age". This does not look neutral to me. "at this stage of life" or "at this young age" would not have triggered this in me.
Unfortunately, written text is not sufficiently precise for this kind of things.
I'm biased though. I happen to have met (independently) two people last year who were sorry for me and wanted to make me believe in God (which is okay. When you have convictions, you may want to make people adopt your convictions - but they didn't seem to understand my point of view). I also went to the US and met people there who were seeing atheists as extremists and intolerent people (I was ok for them though, because I am agnostic - so for them, I consider the existence of God).
Just to add some potential insight. One of the fundamental beliefs of Christianity is that all people are in trouble/broken/sinners/in need of saving. So when you say they feel sorry for you that is actually part of the belief system. Even if you think you're okay they do not. It's not a matter of you being successful or not, but your moral standing before God.
So regardless of your point of view they're always going to act like you need fixing/saving.
That said they may well have not understood your point of view.
Thank you for your definitely insightful answer. Yes, now that you say it, they both tried to save me for these reasons. This makes sense. I guess there is no way such a person and I can really agree on this.
Though this is positive for me: they tried to save me because they liked me. I guess.
Unfortunately, it seems like I'm doomed. I cannot imagine that God (if exists) made us broken by default, defective by design. Why would Him, since he is good?
This is kind of depressing when you think about it and this is the opposite of what I think about humanity: I think most people are fine by default (even though I've already been assaulted).
I think you've identified one of the hardest intellectual problems for believers the problem of evil. If a perfect God exist that created everything how is there evil? It's one of the more difficult ideas to wrestle with. Far deeper than most of the arguments most people make against the existence of God. I'm a Christian myself but I've not come up with a satisfactory answer for me.
> Is it really just the existence of social media that caused this, or is it maybe a change of culture that emerged with the spread of the Internet and social media?
I don't see how the difference would matter. You can never think technological progress without the societal changes it entails, even if software developers etc. like to do so to ignore the responsibility.
This breaks the HN guidelines, especially the one that says "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." Also the one against name-calling in arguments.
Religious flamewar is particularly not allowed here. Please don't post like this again.
Believing that some (unproven and nonexistent) entity is going to solve all your problems
Few religious people believe anything so simplistic, and many religious believers have a much greater sense of personal responsibility and empowerment than the norm.
I'm not a religious believer, and only a few years ago I was an indignant anti-theist, but I can now easily accept that the decline of religion could be a factor in the rise in depression (having experienced much depression in my own life).
Some of the factors in religion that may reduce the propensity for depression include: a sense of meaning beyond one's self; a sense of belonging and community; a sense of the transcendent; the sense of fulfilment that comes from charity and/or service to others; having a set of stories, principles, metaphors etc that can help in working through difficult life problems.
Religion may not be for you, and the "benefits" I've suggested above may seem absurd given your own understanding or experience of religion, but please try to consider that perhaps the reason so many people still find it compelling is that there's more in it for them than there might seem from a simplistic assessment.
You're exagerating the parent's claims. It is possible that religion can reduce stress, and help against depression without being an absolute defense. Our brain may just be wired that way. This doesn't even involve God or the supernatural actually existing for these effects to be real.
You should check some of the talks, and lectures by Robert Sapolsky (an atheist), who advances this in several of them.
Nobody has the capacity to create a worldview solely based on things they have personally proven to themselves. You have to trust someone somewhere without the ability to verify their claims. Every human being has to do this somewhere in their life.
You are delusional if you claim you have evidence for everything you believe. You believe facts from sources you trust. And no human today has the capacity to independently verify what it believes to be True.
You live your live by faith, just like everybody else.
I am curious whether there was an equal effect for boys and girls. Most of the men I know are a lot less active on social media than women, but I'm not sure if this is also true for teenagers.
Protip: It’s not the individual’s mobile device usage patterns that are the problem. It’s the usage patterns of everyone else that turns out to be distressing.
Before I even started reading, I knew it was going to be an attack at the phone. A few centuries ago, they'd attack books. Look back at videos from the 1950s and people didn't talk to each other on the train back then either, their noses were in books, magazines and newspapers. By the 80s, the nerdy kids had headphones and cassette players. By the 90s, people had discmans.
The trouble with articles like this is they don't explore the other factors. Maybe the simply access to information makes kids more nihilistic. And nihilism isn't a bad thing. The universe is absurd, we have no meaning except what we give to ourselves (through religion or belief of whatever). Maybe kids are just realizing this, and it has nothing to do with technology? Maybe they're realizing that because of technology.
Maybe they see a wold that's yelling at them, calling them entitled, where they know they'll be in more debt and less paid than any other generation before them. Maybe it's just the pure knowledge of our place as cogs in the gears.
There are tons of factors for where we are today. The income gap is getting wider, parents are struggling to give their kids a good standard of living. Many parents can't pay for their kids educations like the previous generation could because it's getting too expensive.
The article says "every region in the country." Are they just looking at the US? If you didn't find similar numbers in Europe, where they have the same access to cellphones and technology, they you have to address the other issues such as health care, better pubic welfare, freedom of transportation and high standards of living.
>In just the five years between 2010 and 2015, the number of U.S. teens who felt useless and joyless – classic symptoms of depression – surged 33 percent in large national surveys. Teen suicide attempts increased 23 percent. Even more troubling, the number of 13- to 18-year-olds who committed suicide jumped 31 percent.
Perhaps to a nihilist maybe that's not a bad thing, but to most that's neither good nor nihilism. This is a serious problem.
The US culture needs some changes. We’re still having children bringing guns to school to shoot their bullies. It happened before MySpace and Facebook. There are structural problems in a society where expressions of love are rarer than violence.
Last I knew, kids were still largely growing up in schools where being smart is dumb and prosecuted through bullying. That’s sufficient for mass depression to climb when the rest of life becomes more stressful. I.e. people really are having a hard time finding actually good work that provides health care and a steady paycheck and decent work environment. The opioid crisis has fallouts, in addition.
Most of what I just said was said by the hippies in the 60s.
> We’re still having children bringing guns to school to shoot their bullies.
Americans seem to bring guns to church to shoot church goers. They bring guns to cinemas to shoot patrons. They leave guns in their car's back seat so their infant can accidentally shoot them through the back of their own head.
I think the example of gun violence has a solution found outside the topic of teen depression.
Gun ownership and the romanticism around the 'right to bear arms' in the US is a whole deluded issue in itself.
I addressed depression in the later paragraph. Kids are facing a pinch. If they do the socially expected thing and be “dumb” they face dismal employment opportunities. If they buck the trend they face harassment and still bad employment opportunities. Faced with no way out people feel depressed. And I’m just singling out a couple stress points there.
Children like to think they're special. Parents of children like to think their child is special. And we're doing more than ever to try to convince children that they're special. But reality is not so kind. The vast majority of people, by definition, are not special and never will be. The internet emphasizes this truism. Whether your personal desire is intelligence, strength, beauty, music, or some other skill - the internet will emphasize that, even for your age, you suck.
That explains the useless part at least. As for joyless, I think the huge number of apps designed to give you that constant burst of something, ostensibly dopamine, that gives that feeling of joy (and more importantly from their perspective, addiction) is something that I think will have, almost with complete certainty, unforeseen consequences. Look at casinos and you see people that who are 'happily' inserting their pennies and pulling the rod - yet they look, and mostly are, completely miserable. Their addiction we consider negative because money is directly involved, yet is the addition to notifications, numbers, and all the sort of bells and whistles modern social sites use to trigger addiction truly that different? If anything, the insidious nature of it all makes it seem even worse.
Rasing tuition from $50 a year for baby boomers in the 70s to 25k a year any generation facing a life of indentured servitude when their parents got to be human beings is going to be nihilistic.
The vast majority of kids don't realize what money means. I mean they do in the abstract sense, but they tend to be naively unrealistic about the future. What's $70k of debt per year (paired with compound interest) matter when they'll be a millionaire in a decade or two anyhow?
--Edit--
Interesting, people didn't seem to realize this was true. Here [1] is a study from Gallup on peoples' views on wealth. There is a strong inverse correlation between the number of people that expect to become "rich" and age. For ages 18-29 it's 51%. That decreases down to 8% by the time people are 65, which is still unrealistic.
That study is from 2003, yet its results have been replicated with minimal change in other more recent studies as well (though not from Gallup). It's part of the reason that education loans are simultaneously so overtly predatory, but also phenomenally successful (from the point of view of lenders). Young people are completely unrealistic about their chances for success and so the implications of taking on mountains of debt with often poor interest rates, when you're young, is something they cannot accurately assess.
Kahneman would disagree. Correlation is only weak for those above the median income. Furthermore, a lower than median income appears to amplify other negative factors (illness, stress, etc.)
Note that the study data is 10 years old. It would be interesting to know what today’s kids today believe is the median.
>The trouble with articles like this is they don't explore the other factors. Maybe the simply access to information makes kids more nihilistic. And nihilism isn't a bad thing. The universe is absurd, we have no meaning except what we give to ourselves (through religion or belief of whatever). Maybe kids are just realizing this, and it has nothing to do with technology? Maybe they're realizing that because of technology.
I don't want to just write you off with a snotty, "Rubbish!", but IMHO, yes, this is rubbish. Nihilism is just plain wrong-headed. It's answering, "No" where you should answer, "Mu"[1].
I think it is no coincidence that in your final paragraph you don't specify the question. Can you formulate a specific question in such a way that an nihilist might answer "No", but you feel that the correct answer is "Mu"?
"What is the meaning of life?" - a nihilist would answer 'mu'.
"Is there any intrinsic meaning to life?" - a nihilist would answer 'no', and it seems to me that 'mu' would be an obvious copout.
Is your point that the word 'meaning' itself is meaningless?
>"Is there any intrinsic meaning to life?" - a nihilist would answer 'no', and it seems to me that 'mu' would be an obvious copout.
Yes, it does seem to me that "mu" would be a copout. A binary question about a well-specified (you could say, meaningful, ahaha) concept should not be answered with "mu".
>Is your point that the word 'meaning' itself is meaningless?
No, more that the kind of people who ask "is there a meaning to life?" are underspecifying the word. I think it would be useful to have a companion here to "mu", meaning, "Your question is so vague as to be meaningless."
An easy way to see the issue is to ask: what would it be like (whether that's what we really experience or not) for there to definitively be meaning in life? If you can't answer that, can't ground such a basically humanistic question in even potential human experience, then I charge that the question has become meaningless, and should thus be either refined or discarded.
Nihilism can be liberating and a source of joy. Why does there have to be "meaning", whatever that is? Perhaps the issue is that we don't prepare young people properly for it and have an over-reliance on "god". Realizing that you can live your life as you wish is amazing.
It sort of is, though. Nietzsche in particular didn't actually portray nihilism as a good thing, but just an inevitable stage in human development, which could be either very good or very bad depending on what kind of values system (if any) arose from that nihilism. There are in my opinion some similarities between the direction we're heading and what he called "The Last Man", which was basically the worst possible outcome of nihilism.
Of course there is. I was just trying to point out that the views on it, even from the perspective of nihilists, isn’t necessarily that nihilism is a “good thing”.
Humans focus on what they look at, compounding into a perspective, belief, and actions.
You can’t work to think nothing is of any consequence and simultaneously work to build anything of value (family, friendships, business, intellect, etc). Nihilism is the abolishment of value systems. Nothing matters. Building things of value requires a system to evaluate value.
No, nihilism is the denial of any intrinsic value, we are still all free to make up and agree on our own values if we want, but it would be because we decided to, as untethered things in a meaningless expanse.
Ah I see so deciding, as in to act as though something is intrinsically true. Is it just me that these things so often seem like arguing about semantics? Or are we talking more about weight (extrinsic) vs. mass (intrinsic)?
Your reference to "faith in anything" is most likely referring to a central being controlling everything (see: god), as faith in something/anyone doesn't give that something meaning. Nihilism doesn't necessary refer to faith, it's typically referring to existential nihilism, or that nothing has an intrinsic meaning. Nothing comes with meaning. This isn't something to despair, you have full ability to give things meaning. What I'm getting at is more in the realm of optimistic nihilism, or that ability to give your own meaning to things, as they didn't have any intrinsic meaning to begin with. That game you're playing? Some might think of it as a waste but you gave it the meaning of happiness. That flower you're smelling didn't come with meaning by default, but you gave it the meaning of beauty. I would argue faith can be a burden more than nihilism as blind faith can lead to complacency. Again, complacency might not be the worst thing until you give that meaning.
> According to the theory, each individual is an isolated being born into the universe, barred from knowing "why", yet compelled to invent meaning.
> The common thread in the literature of the existentialists is coping with the emotional anguish arising from our confrontation with nothingness, and they expended great energy responding to the question of whether surviving it was possible. Their answer was a qualified "Yes," advocating a formula of passionate commitment and impassive stoicism.
It depends on your level of cognitive development. Construct aware thinkers realize that meaning undeniably exists, even if it is seen to be empty of basis.
You ask how? I accept that any search for meaning in life is founded on a categorical error. Life is not the sort of thing that can have meaning. Then, I just get on with the business of trying to find some modicum of happiness while I still breathe.
I don't think that's hard to imagine. I'm imagining it right now. I don't think we're going to get there without some strange forces acting on us, and idk if that's a society I want, but we are more malleable than we give ourselves credit for. People seem to think that life as we know it is life in all it's possibilities rather than one permutation of an infinite mess of dissimilar outcomes.
I think the things we struggle over which will determine our future are battles of coincidence and not fated. I don't think communism and capitalism needed to compete through their representative nations in the cold war, that was just the way we dressed up a power struggle, where power struggles are the actual predictable thing.
I'd be interested to know what that society looks like, if you want to share.
My own personal observation is people who are totally absorbed in social media are socially anxious and awkward, don't engage in conversation except about things that are in their very narrow areas of interest, and tend to suddenly get heated or "triggered" very quickly when exploring those subjects.
There really is no such thing as "casual conversation" with them. You're either engaging in total mind-meld or you're completely ignored. I don't understand that mindset, so I'm keeping an open mind, but I don't see how that can't trap a person into a rigid and boring life, where you're confined to your home most of the time and only engage with people who share 99% of your opinions about things that only affect you in a marginal way.
I think we agree. For living that way to not be massively depressing, as you say, it would have to be a different world. Social media would need to be different. Sociological lessons would have to be learned that prevent the internet and social media from being what they are in reality.
Thankfully at least my imagination can step out of this reality. I can see a scenario where people are spread thin and just use remote conversation instead of in-person.
I can see a world where politics and profiteering don't end up in the way of quality communications tools.
That's a good point. Maybe it's the combination of both. The access to information that was not before reachable to teenagers. What I've noticed for myself once online access becomes more and more universal, more information is also available, and this means that also information about what is _really_ happening in the world becomes available, not just curated "everything is ok" information.
Information about wars being waged, global poverty, the US raging wars, nuclear holocaust fears, and the feedback loops that the effect of anybody becoming a journalist these days creates. Also the combination of internet trolls, systematic brainwashing and censorship, makes it even harder to understand what is real and what is not.
But it might be the phones, I see more and more kids, like aged 10 - 15, walking in the playgrounds, streets, sitting down with phones in their hands, staring at some game or video that is providing them with constant small feedback. It used to be that if you were outside, you at least were walking and concentrating on just that, or you were sitting down with your friends at the playground, now everybody seems to have a phone or they are looking at somebody elses phone.
It's a complex issue for sure. But I wouldn't blame the kids either, as they learn these habits from their parents, who to be honest most are just getting used to the internet phenomena and global information access, it's not that much of an old thing, although us working in the technical field who have had access since maybe childhood to BBSs etc might think so.
>>Before I even started reading, I knew it was going to be an attack at the phone. A few centuries ago, they'd attack books.
Books are categorically different from smartphones. For one, they don't constantly interrupt regular conversations by beeping and buzzing and demanding the owner's attention. For another, they tend to be about a single subject, and tend to explore that subject in depth.
Yes, and books don't tell you everyone hates you and show that awful photo where you look fat and stupid every second minute and how much better everyone else is at everything and how a person even stupider and more obnoxious than you ends up as president and that really cute guy/girl has millions of friends and you're not one of them...
If you have 500 friends, your feed is dominated by the 5 friends with spectacular stories about their stupendous lives.
Continuously comparing your ordinary life against your feed naturally makes you feel bad about yourself.
And being on public display 24x7, with the pressure to perform for your audience, in a never-ending struggle to keep up, must do incredible damage to the psyche.
Teenagers don't use facebook. Instagram and snapchat more. Which is kinda more effective in creating a false image of somebody else having the great look, great time, when you just take pictures of the "best" moments of your life, and leave out everything else.
Agreed, if you look at things like global warming and nuclear war, Artificial Intelligence - being inundated with these types of things can be pretty depressing. There's not a lot of sources of Hope for children these days. Blaming it directly on phones seems a bit like tunnel vision.
That being said, it might be wise to control access to this type of information until your children grow up and get better context / moral code to deal with such things.
This is in no way a proven fact. Only one of many possible philosophical views on life.
> Maybe they see a wold that's yelling at them, calling them entitled, where they know they'll be in more debt and less paid than any other generation before them. Maybe it's just the pure knowledge of our place as cogs in the gears.
Yes and they have a 24/7 view of the world now. You didn't have that even 20 years ago.
> Are they just looking at the US? If you didn't find similar numbers in Europe, where they have the same access to cellphones and technology, they you have to address the other issues such as health care, better pubic welfare, freedom of transportation and high standards of living.
Those factors already exist in the US-some have higher standards of living here than others, some have better healthcare, some have freedom of exploration and the numbers are still there.
that is a cheap shot. while it could be screens, it could also be the polarization of society. and while the polarization may also relate to the decentralizatoin of media and it's arbitration (enabled by screens), this too is more complex that just the screen.
Study: Increases in Depressive Symptoms, Suicide-Related Outcomes, and Suicide Rates Among U.S. Adolescents After 2010 and Links to Increased New Media Screen Time
Citation: Jean M. Twenge, Thomas E. Joiner, Megan L. Rogers, Gabrielle N. Martin. Clinical Psychological Science Vol 6, Issue 1, pp. 3 - 17. November 14, 2017.
Abstract: In two nationally representative surveys of U.S. adolescents in grades 8 through 12 (N = 506,820) and national statistics on suicide deaths for those ages 13 to 18, adolescents’ depressive symptoms, suicide-related outcomes, and suicide rates increased between 2010 and 2015, especially among females. Adolescents who spent more time on new media (including social media and electronic devices such as smartphones) were more likely to report mental health issues, and adolescents who spent more time on nonscreen activities (in-person social interaction, sports/exercise, homework, print media, and attending religious services) were less likely. Since 2010, iGen adolescents have spent more time on new media screen activities and less time on nonscreen activities, which may account for the increases in depression and suicide. In contrast, cyclical economic factors such as unemployment and the Dow Jones Index were not linked to depressive symptoms or suicide rates when matched by year.
I'd love to see something like this become a feature on HN/reddit: above the normal replies there is one special pinned (and perhaps even moderated) thread which is strictly used to gather links to original articles / alternative sources / studies / ...
Study: Exploring how social networking sites impact youth with anxiety: A qualitative study of Facebook stressors among adolescents with an anxiety disorder diagnosis
Authors of studies like this are well aware of this. I haven't read this paper, but these papers often go to great pains to explain how they controlled or screened-out other causes.
I think it's fair to be off-hand sceptical without digging into the details of the paper. Since we don't really understand depression, it seems fairly obvious that it would be nigh on impossible to control for causes we don't know.
While “correlation is not causation” is a tired refrain, I agree that default skepticism is the generally appropriate response. There are peer reviewed scientific studies showing essentially everything and anything you could want to believe. Relatively few hold up to scrutiny or repeat experiments.
There is undoubtedly an opposing study that shows increased screen time correlates to happiness.
Various possible con founders were discussed at length in the article. The obvious one, depression leading to social
Media use:
“Two followed people over time, with both studies finding that spending more time on social media led to unhappiness, while unhappiness did not lead to more social media use. A third randomly assigned participants to give up Facebook for a week versus continuing their usual use. Those who avoided Facebook reported feeling less depressed at the end of the week.”
It's mentioned in the article. They refer to 3 other studies - one was based on randomly selected people who had to give up fb and they felt less depressed as a result; the other two found out that spending more time on social media led to unhappiness, while unhappiness did not lead to more social media use.
huh? It could very well be that teens who are depressed (because of unrelated causes) prefer to spend time on social media, not hanging out with friends...
Strong, persistent correlation between A and B generally implies that it's one of three scenarios: A->B, B->A, or C->A + C->B.
In cases where it's not possible to do proper experiments to explicitly test A->B hypothesis, you'd say that correlation implies causation in the (not that rare) scenario where you have strong reasons to believe that B->A is not possible (e.g. the increase in teen suicides IMHO did not cause the increase in screen time) and you have thoroughly went through all the plausible confounders (C's) and have argumentation/evidence why that's not the case. In that case it's still not solid proof, but it's certainly a good implication and worth considering as likely true until further analysis or evidence.
Effects measured as part of a randomization procedure in a controlled experiment or, failing that, a causal inference model applied to observational data.
Many of the answers here are pointing to methods, but I take this question as more fundamental.
Epistemologically, causation is the intersection of three things:
1) Temporal precedence
2) Covariance (i.e. correlation)
3) Absence of likely alternative explanations
Number 3 is by far the trickiest. Our inability to definitively rule out all possible alternatives means one has to resort to inference where causation is concerned.
Randomised intervention - i.e. randomly selecting a group of people to change their behaviour and comparing to the group that doesn’t change, who ideally receives a placebo. The random part is important, any other type of selection (e.g. observing people who choose to change their own behaviour) doesn’t work, in theory at least.
Don’t confuse studies with experiments, only the latter can prove causation (because you need random experiment and control groups), studies are for highlighting strong correlations by trying to take all the possible causes into account
“Correlation does not imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there.’” (Thanks to XKCD)
It’s true that correlation does not imply causation. But it’s a stupid middlebrow dismissal to throw out there.
According to this she's at least in the 8th percentile (http://graphics.wsj.com/what-percent/). Meaning she doesn't have to worry about keeping a roof over her head or how to feed herself (that's 1 in 6 btw https://www.dosomething.org/facts/11-facts-about-hunger-us). So yeah, she's safely rich enough to be insulated from being wrong about poverty. And people will listen to her because she has a title (ie rich enough to pay for one) and so therefore they assume she is right.
>35% of all households in San Diego make at least that much (something like 180,000 people), and the percentage is significantly higher if you only look at mid-career professionals.
Median household income in her city for her age group is about $80k/year. $100k/year puts her in the top 35% or so of all households, but probably not “rich” by local standards under a typical definition of “rich”.
When someone says “that guy is rich”, “oh what a sheltered rich guy who can’t understand the struggles of the rest of us”, etc., I’m imagining someone who eats expensive restaurant meals 5 times a week, vacations all over the world, puts their kids in exclusive private schools, maybe owns a sailboat or a small plane, buys luxury cars, etc... Someone who can just afford to buy a house and put 3 kids through college and save for a modest retirement seems pretty solidly “middle class” by most standards. You might have a different definition.
Obviously if you compare to rural peasants or developing country factory workers, $100k is a very high salary, but compared to working professionals in urban California with a similar amount of training and experience, state university professors are at the low end of salaries.
>Someone who can just afford to buy a house and put 3 kids through college and save for a modest retirement seems pretty solidly “middle class” by most standards. You might have a different definition.
idk what standards these are. Someone who can buy a house, put 3 kids through college and retire is rich. Do you live in America??
You are basically describing every suburban, white picket-fence American dream lifestyle, a lifestyle unobtainable for most people because most people aren't rich.
Thank god for our daily "social media" is evil propaganda. I hope one day someone looks into who is pushing this and why. It would be very interesting. At this point, all the outrage and propaganda really comes off as manufactured and fake.
Maybe it's a generational thing. When I was a child, it was south park, simpsons and gangsta rap that was ruining kids mental health. And video games were responsible for school shootings and all of life's ills.
For my parents generation, it was TV, rock and roll and marijuana.
Something always has to be wrong in order for the media to sell advertising to us I guess.
If anything is leading to our collective mental health deterioration, it's the constant media barrage on tv, newspapers and social media telling us that we are depressed. But fear is what sells.
Your comment feels like cynical contrarianism. Just because everyone says social media is bad doesn't mean its not. The observed increase in suicide rates among teens is real and this study presents evidence that social media might explain this rise including careful controls for other factors. Is this study the end of the story on social media? Of course not, but it shows that there is some there there.
And... my problem with my argument wasn't that it was untrue, but that it was kinda mean. I don't feel jealous of the lives of almost anyone I went to high school with; quite the opposite. A lot of them post "racist memes with spelling mistakes" - which is sad on many levels; If nothing else, it is a certain indicator that they are not living their best lives... but I have a hard time imagining a world where I could be jealous of someone like that.
For that matter, most of the positive social media content I see is baby pictures. I'm one of those people who is glad other people have children; I admire parents, yes, but I certainly wouldn't want to be one myself.
I suppose I just don't get it. Do other people carefully curate their social media lists so that they are only following the super-rich, super-successful and super-articulate? because my experience with social media is that I see people closer to 'average' when I log in to facebook, whereas in real life, I live in a world where most people I spend time interacting with are smarter and wealthier and more successful than I am on several other axes.
[1]The silicon valley "Agile Articulators" toastmasters debate club - we meet at the Hacker Dojo in Santa Clara. https://www.meetup.com/Agile-Articulators-Toastmasters-Club