High school seniors & unhappiness

Investment Analysis Clubs Macro Economic Trends and Risks
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It’s easy to speculate. Here is one idea. Suppose females generally exhibit more empathy than males and that liberals have more empathy than conservatives. So when Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012 and his killer acquitted, liberal females would likely have been most impacted by the unfairness of it all. Combine that with the ramping of social media around 2010 (e.g., Facebook and Twitter both began in the mid-2000s), which promoted an increase in cyberbullying and online sexual harassment as well as providing a forum for far right hate speech, and it becomes easy to rationalize why women in general and liberal women in particular would become depressed.

The authors of the paper linked in your OP suggested this possibility:

" Among the most socially privileged group, male adolescents with highly educated parents, conservative ideology may work as a psychological buffer by harmonizing an idealized worldview with the bleak external realities experienced by many ([Jost et al., 2008). This group presumably benefits from the American cultural myth of an equal playing field in which exceptional social positions are thought to be earned through hard-work and talent rather than inherited through codified privilege…"

In other words, liberal women are more depressed than conservative men because many of the latter live in a dream world divorced from reality.

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I was trying to think of a way to say “because conservative men are fat, dumb, and happy” or “ignorance is bliss” in a nicer, more socially acceptable way.

Thanks for doing that so much better than I could.

—Peter

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Sorry, but this study and similar PhD turns on the scholastic stage strike me as misleading and even absurd on many levels. The pollsters notion of “depressed” and how to measure it quickly is likely focusing attention on what amount to shadowplays. “Social moods” such as this are not new, can be extremely shortlived and/or shallow, or be expressive of entirely different and even cheerful causal basis.

See for instance, Sturm und Drang - Wikipedia

…sentimentality and an objective view of life gave way to emotional turbulence and individuality, and Age of Enlightenment ideals such as rationalism, empiricism, and universalism no longer captured the human condition; emotional extremes and subjectivity became the vogue during the late 18th century…The Sturm und Drang movement did not last long; according to Betty Waterhouse it began in 1771 and ended in 1778 (Waterhouse v). The rise of the middle class in the 18th century led to a change in the way society and social standings were looked at

Societies, how they “feel”, and how that is expressed are extremely complex interrelated selfcontraditory messes with huge unknown time lags of experience, expression, and meaning. Digital social media probably adds an enormous level of amplification on feed back for what is differentially experienced by different population segments.

This book: The Sorrows of Young Werther - Wikipedia
was considered the “very portrait of our time”, but that “time” came and went with extraordinary rapidity. Reading it (oh my lord!) was crucial to convincing Young David to NOT trust surface reads of socially expressed emotions.

d fb

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Right wing totalitarianism is on the rise throughout the western world. Empathetic people who care about human rights are anxious and depressed for good reason.

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Here ya go.
Today’s kids are depressed cause of smoking.
Smoking relieves depression and anxiety.

:no_smoking:
ralph missed the old HURL board.

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A modest proposal: No smartphones for kids
https://www.axios.com/2024/03/22/kids-childhood-smartphone-ban-social-media
Don’t give your kid a smartphone before high school, and don’t let them use social media before age 16, New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues in a new book.

The shift from “play-based” to “phone-based” childhoods is making our kids sick and miserable, Haidt argues. In “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” out March 26, Haidt says that staring at screens all the time is terrible for human development…

Banning phones in schools “is the easiest and fastest step we can take to improve youth mental health,” Haidt writes.

DB2

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Yes. But I fear that the operable verb needs to shift from “is making” to “has made”, and that the complex mix of habits, shared cultural knowledge (how to play “hide and seek” or sand lot baseball above the infant level by creatively legislating new rules to fit circumstances and opportunities) has largely died. Even the children in my relatively poor local pueblo here in Mexico show this deprivation.

We might have to rent busloads of Amish children to help our deprived children learn how to be children again…

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Only if you think that way of life might return.
We didn’t play the same as our grandparents, and somehow it prepared us to live in our current world. Our parents worried about our TV-based entertainment.
Today’s kids won’t grow into a world where phone-based isn’t a way of life.
And who knows what their kids and grandkids will think is play.

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As mentioned somewhere in this thread, it’s not the technology that’s the problem, it’s the use of it. Things change over time. That’s a simple fact. But it is very much different if someone who’s more or less formed as a person, with basic beliefs and values, and confidence (at some level) is exposed to all these things than if we’re talking about teenagers. This is the period where peers become more important and now these “peers” are influencers (no comment, let me not start that topic).

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What all this media hysteria about “social media” reminds me of, is all the hysteria about video games, when they were new in the late 70s/early 80s

Older generations had other things to whip hysteria up about.

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Murthy wrote in a New York Times op-ed that statistics are clear about the effect social media has on adolescents, particularly those who are facing anxiety and depression issues. He said that while warning labels only won’t protect young people it’s a first step in the acknowledgment of its dangers.

DB2

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Like Hamas, is use of “social media” a cause, or a symptom?

Steve

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Like Hamas, it’s likely both: originating and self-perpetuating.

Pete

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It is a cause. No question.

We all know from experience that much of one’s youth is spent doing and saying stupid things because we don’t know better. That’s how one learns to know better. Putting all those mistakes in front of a global audience where it never gets erased has pretty obvious negative consequences.

I would also bet dollars to donuts that a disproportionate number of frequent social media users are social misfits with psychological issues. Letting kids on social media platforms unsupervised is like sending them out alone at night in a sketchy neighborhood to get cash from the ATM.

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I think social media is deadly because it strongly tends to displace “real” flesh and blood and mind and spirit socializing, and real socializing is extremely important to us primates.

I think it is a catastrophe for many adults as well as children, although the children being less socialized to begin wtih are more vulnerable.

I hate it. The fool is the closest to social media that I use, and I put limits on my use of it.

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It’s not just social media though. It’s all media. And some would argue that it is tech itself that is causing it. For example, the shift from viewing “TV” (including movies, etc) together with other people to watching it on your own device with headphones (earbuds, speaker, etc) is a very large behavioral change. I can witness it in my own family. We had “movie nights” all the time where we would gather around on the sofas/chairs/floor and watch a movie together. And we all took breaks at the same time, if the majority agreed that it was time to make popcorn, we would pause the movie, I would get the popcorn pot out and make popcorn. That was a break of perhaps 10 minutes that we all took together. Some of us would go to the bathroom briefly, some would grab another snack, some would help make the popcorn, etc. But often during that time we would discuss the movie so far and perhaps guess what comes next. Today? Everyone, including me, watches on our own device at our own pace with our own snacks, no discussion until perhaps much later, if at all. Now, part of it is all the kids becoming big teens and adults, but still I remember in my family as a kid and young adult we would gather round the VCR player and watch the movie that we got from Blockbuster together.

Same for travel. In any mode of travel today, people entertain themselves with earbuds in (mostly) and using personal devices. Twenty years ago? People would perhaps do other things alone, but sometimes would talk to their seat neighbor. And on a plane, everyone watched the same movie on those pop-down screens, and sometimes may have discussed it. Or at least reacted to it together.

Finally, when it comes to travel, people do solitary drives MUCH more often today than in previous generations. And again, on a solitary drive, you are alone, nobody to interact with.

And when it comes to children? Parents are absurdly afraid to let their kids out of the house, so they stay inside most of the time. And because parents are busy, those kids are … on devices most of the time. If the primary effect is lack of socializing, the secondary effect is reduced health from all the sitting around instead of moving around. When I was a kid, the first thing I wanted to do when I got home from school was to get on my bike and go meet friends somewhere to “do stuff”. Nowadays, the first thing a kid wants to do when they get home from school is to get on their device and catch up on minecraft or watch a series of cool tikpik videos … because they weren’t allowed to do it at school.

And it’s not just kids, it’s everyone. Even me, and my 80+ year old parents, spend way too much time on connected devices simply whiling away the time on what passes for “entertainment”. Or even semi-creative stuff like word games or number games. Yes, those are good for the aging brain, but so is socialization good for the aging brain, and you need a combination of both.

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Mark

Yes to everything you wrote.

I would add to our list of modern maladies linked to technical takeover of human entertainment and interaction that politics worldwide has gone nuts, and I think a big part is that tech has displace real interaction from children’s street games up through adults lack of such interactions as were provided at churches, ballrooms and honkeytonks, live theaters, and 4th July baseball with grannies on base.

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This is in large part a demographics and economics problem. I grew up in the middle of the Baby boom. There were lots of kids and stay-at-home moms were the norm, which meant that the moms in the neighborhood got to know each other. The neighborhoods felt safer because they probably were.

We have also become more affluent, and with wealth comes different expectations for our kids. Free unstructured play has morphed into organized activities with coaching. In the poorer neighborhoods there are still lots of pick up basketball and spontaneous soccer games where kids choose sides and settle conflicts on their own. Go up the income ladder and you get coaching camps, organized leagues, and travel teams. Not to mention chess clubs, music lessons, etc.

In a more affluent world the fear of parents is more along the lines of their kids not being successful enough.

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While this is absolutely true, it only applies to little kids. I am also a baby boomer at the tail end. As soon as we were able to ride a decent distance on our bikes, we would ride far and wide, way further away than any parent or neighbor parent could see us. Even at age 11-12, we would ride to a big park 5+ miles away from our neighborhood that had great riding paths (and no supervision). As long as we got back in time for dinner, all was fine.

Yes, for some of the kids, but not for all of them. Out of my 5 kids, one is very into sports and joined all the school teams, little league, and travel team. One does a few school sports and math competitions. But the other 3 didn’t do any of those things. They did their schoolwork, got very good grades (luckily they all get very good good grades), had a few friends they would occasionally hang out with, but as teens spent quite a lot of time watching video on their phones/iPads/laptops.

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I have commented before on the psycho parents lined up at the schools in my neighborhood to pick up their spawn. Never saw that traffic jam when I was in school. Everyone piled on the bus.

Of course, thanks to media hysteria about “stranger danger”, some cities have outlawed letting kids wander around by themselves. I remember reading in Newsweek, a number of years ago, of parents being ticketed for letting their kids go to the park on their own. If media hysteria leads to it being impossible/illegal for kids to be kids, what “socialization” options do they have? I would submit they are better off interacting with others on a device, then sitting home, alone. Remember when someone would go nuts and gun down a flock of people, all his neighbors would say “he was really quiet, kept to himself”.

We old phartz remember the media whipping up hysteria 45 years ago about “video games”. They always need to whip up the mob about something.

Steve

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