I stop blaming the phones. It’s tuition and student debt, coupled with *waves hands* all of this.
I don’t blame phones, but I do think big algorithm social media is partially to blame.
It’s the lack of perspective. There’s nothing to work or live towards.
I’m in my early thirties and grew up in the last years of the “it’s getting better” time, but nowadays it’s all gone.
The political system in all of the West is ossified and unable to solve any of the real problems. Society is dominated by a gerontocracy. The economy is fucked for almost all participants, except the very few at the very top.
My generation will not have better lives than our parents. And there’s absolutely no hope for it to become better . In fact, it’s likely getting way way worse for most of us.
Please read wonky news, vote, and tell your friends and neighbors about the stuff you learn about candidates. We get crappy government by voting for it. We could fix the government if we elected people who would write legislation to stop corruption, was there to fix roads and balance budgets rather than scream about triggering issues, and wanted to make a better rather than to simply ‘win’ no matter the price.
I already do vote and try to convince people around me, but here in Germany, the reality is that most people are old and stubborn (average German is 44, average voter even older) and the propaganda of the last decades worked.
Some still believe in trickle down and neoliberalism, some started believing Russian propaganda and are convinced that only right extremists can rescue us.
But that’s exactly the situation I’ve described above. You see the ship steaming onto the rocks, but ⅓ of the crew thinks, that’s fine since it worked so far, ⅓ denies the rocks even exist and the last ⅓ is convinced that rocks are actually an opportunity for growth.
The problem is global and started in 2014. Student debt isn’t an issue in many countries.
Social media seems like the most obvious one to me, if you look at popularity graphs of the various sites it seems to line up pretty well.
Gen Z and A even have a term for it - “brain rot”. If you go down that rabbit hole of memes, it becomes obvious there’s a lot of self-doubt, confusion and angst among that generation, with weirdo influencers impacting their thinking in fairly deep ways.
Why do you think it started that late? I’m pretty sure it started well before then.
Okay, but part of it is phones. Not in like, a ‘kids are always staring at their phones’ sense, but in terms of the ease of communication changing the social landscape.
When I was in my late teens and early 20s, if you wanted to go hang out with someone, you’d go downtown. You might run into the person you were looking for, you might run into someone completely different and have some crazy unexpected adventure, but it mostly happened in the same place. Even with old flip-phones, they facilitated communication but they didn’t derail or substitute it.
Want to see what someone’s doing now? You can immediately message them and either know they’re free or busy or that they’re not responding. And yeah, you could call somebody’s phone, but it was different. There was little incentive to keep a phone charged once you were off with your friends, and those early batteries did not last! I remember my mom giving me shit about never having a charge in my phone when she’d try to call me.
Every day was an unexpected adventure. Very little of it was planned beyond ‘go hang out in town’, but every day was something different. Once all my friends were on social media and carrying smart phones, it changed dramatically. I didn’t have to either go find someone or talk on the phone if I wanted to check in, I just have to message them. There’s no need to go have an adventure to just say ‘hey, what’s up?’. There’s no built-in incentive to team up and go find something to do the way there was when I had to physically get to someone to hang out.
And yeah, we can still make plans, but that’s different. ‘Plans’ were always there, just as something special and organized, but the default was just hanging around. I don’t feel that anymore in the same way. It’s still there, to some extent, because I see some younger folks hanging around, but not in the numbers we had. Plans require planning and come with some pressure that just seeing people around town never did.
I think that need to go out and run into random people in order to have a social experience gave us something that we’re missing now.
Also, like, we know a lot more now. We can see how screwed up humanity is. We know that a lot of our food is the direct result of dystopian sci-fi level torture of entire species. We know that the richest people are happy to light the world on fire to make a buck and that our measures for stopping them have so far not been as effective as we kind of need them to be. We know a lot of the horrible shit people have been doing to one another behind closed doors, and even out in the light of day.
We know a lot more about everything, but we haven’t really had the time to heal from it as a society or even really fully process it all, let alone change it. Given the limits of youthful autonomy until adulthood, it’s hardly surprising that it’s kinda distressing being stuck in the back seat of a car that’s careening toward a cliff while the previous generation’s driver mindlessly stares at a Facebook meme about kids be on their phones.
The whole thing is a mess, and younger people are right to be distressed about it. But technology and our struggle to adapt to it is part of that mess.
ITT: A bunch of folks who didn’t read the article.
The article didn’t say young people were doing worse than before, which it seems like all of you assumed.
The reason the study found for why youth is no longer one of the “happiest times” is because they showed that people only do better and better as they age. So whereas before your youth would be comparatively happier to your ‘mid-life crisis’, they’re saying that crisis doesn’t occur anymore and we just get happier and happier into midlife and old age. So your younger days didn’t get worse, they just aren’t as great in comparison because the rest of your life gets so much better as time goes on.
Sounds crazy, I know. But that’s what the article was actually saying.
Weird article. I think if in your middle aged years you are the most unhappy, its because you have not made the right decisions for yourself. Too many people chase the things they are told will make them happy rather than what they like and know made them happy. Doing what you are “supposed” to do. Alternative paths have their hardship but for me at least, I don’t have the kind of complaint I hear from others. You always have to make some kind of compromise…
It is also the time in people’s lives where they have the most responsibility. Even if you’ve made the right choices in life, that’s when people are their busiest.
But my point is that, that is due to one’s choices. You don’t actually have to get married, have kids, get on the career treadmill. But also some do not even get to have these choices, so have no choice but to follow a non-traditional path. People with disabilities, people who living in places where they are displayed due to political instability, poverty, war etc.
Someone growing up in Ukraine right now, probably wont consider this to be the happiest time in their lives. A person with a disability struggling to establishing independence over even basic life activities. People who just say f–k it.
“No longer”? I’m still waiting for the happy.
I would like some of that “happy” please. It sounds nice
