I can narrow it down to three critical problems with our society.
1. Car dependent cities.
2. Housing crisis
3. Wage suppression
Young people can't go anywhere because they can't afford a car because all their money goes to rent. Even if they WANTED to go somewhere, there isn't anywhere to go because car dependent infrastructure has killed all the places that young people used to hang out.
They don't make enough money to survive, much less thrive. I know a lot of GenZ people living in rotting camper trailers, sheds, tents, and cars. Many of my millennial friends are going through the same thing. They have no savings, no house, and they could never afford to start a family. A child is a ruinous event instead of joyous. There is no safety net and the tight rope is made of silly string.
But what they can afford are cell phones and Instagram/TikTok where they talk to each other.
Did you actually read the article? The three things you cite were literally never mentioned. We've been heavily car dependent since the 50s. Most of the places teens have been hanging out for the past 40 years are built around cars--malls, theaters, etc--you drive to all of them
Teens are not sitting around sulking because they can't ride the train somewhere. They're all glued to their phones doomscrolling until they can't take it anymore
So while cars became popular in the 50s, it look a long time for us to basically build everything around them. As late as 1969, 48% of kids walked or biked to school, which declined to 13% in 2009^. This has been the result of a combination of real and perceived dangers, and subject to somewhat of a feedback loop as we've made roads wider and faster.
I was lucky to be able to walk to school as a kid in the 90s, and found that time to be a delicious moment of early freedom each day as kids from my neighborhood and I chose our route and cut through backyards and patches of woods to pick up other kids. I lived in a small town without wide or fast roads, so this was largely safe, but I understand why it's not possible in most suburbs today. I loved my ability to ride my bike to friends' houses and down to the town beach in the summer, without having to ask my parents for a ride.
I think I would have been a very unhappy kid growing up in the typical American suburb of today, shepherded between structured activities and constantly monitored by adults. Retreating to a private online world may be an unhealthy coping mechanism, but it makes sense.
The comment you replied to was an attempt (IMO a fairly successful one) to go one "why?" deeper on the question.
It takes as a given the article's point that the proximate cause of the issue is phone / social media centrism (IMO this is also right), but then it asks why? Why is youth culture so centered on devices and social media?
It wasn't phones or the contemporary version of social media for me (missed that by just under five years), but I already felt this when I was an adolescent. For me it was the late-90s wave of internet-connected video games, and the forums about the ones I played - absolutely a form of social media. And I very much relate to, "well what else would I be doing?". Everything else I could do required a parent to do it with me, and while they spent a huge amount of their time on involvement in fruitful things for me to do, in the form of things like sports and organized group activities (boy scouts, etc.), they also very reasonably had their own lives and couldn't just chaperone their kids all night every night and all day every weekend day. And then, what in the world else was I going to do? Where could I go to just hang out with friends, when I was 13, and what could we do on our own? Nowhere and nothing. My impression is that this has only gotten worse.
The respite from this was college, and I'm convinced this is why pretty much everyone fortunate enough to go to a residential college looks back on it very fondly. Colleges have everything their students need, within short walks, and like an infinite number of places for young people to just independently hang out with each other, without having to pay for anything. It's such a revelation! But you do that for just a few years, and then you discover that it only worked because it was absurdly subsidized, either by someone else - parents, taxpayers, wealthy scholarship / grant funders - or by your own future earnings. And out in the real world, all the gathering spaces - bars, coffee shops, restaurants - suddenly become impractically expensive, and all the distances between people become impractically large.
foxyv's comment is much closer to how my friends feel about the world than the convenient list of conservative talking points presented in the article.
the devices are no small part of it, but neither is car centrism and the resulting lack of agency - it was lost gradually but is now complete, at least in the US
vs kids in Japan, Europe etc who are meaningfully independent from a far, far earlier age and have far, far more opportunities for socialization than kids in the US do
this is not to say they do not also have their own issues (in many cases device related), but yeah, let's not pretend like car-centrism has nothing to do with it, because it absolutely does
I've long wondered why we haven't had a federal level (or even some state level) bans on social media for minors at this point? It seems like the effects are well established, more widespread than any drug has ever been and probably more severe.
My kids aren't allowed to use social media and we are "the mean parents" now because of it since "everybody else's parents let them." Some of these kids were on Instagram in 4th grade. It took years of explaining what we were protecting them from before they started to really get it, seeing their friends at school who's entire life is on a 4 inch screen.
They understand now, but the pressure is very real.
Of course I read the article! But it ignores the problems that have plagued three generations before Gen Z and focus on stuff that is unique to them. Sure, cell phones kinda suck for mental health, but why are kids even using them if they suck so much? What prevents kids from doing anything else?
> Parents ask me: Why are my kids so anxious and depressed? Where do they go all day on their devices? How can I get them back?
They're sitting around doomscrolling because they can't afford to do anything else.
I had a medium-range breakfast the other day... waffles coffee and a mimosa with bacon on the side: $66. Jesus that's more than 4 hours with the local minimum wage before taxes. Realistically the take home from an entire shift -- for a standard breakfast.
If I go out to a bar, every drink is $10.
If I want to go visit a friend, there's no parking anywhere on a Friday night unless you live miles and miles away from the city center. And people keep getting shot/stabbed on public transit. You can laud it all you want but it feels unsafe for a tall dude in his 30s... a lot of young people aren't going to feel comfortable with the local public transit.
The rent is too high, there's nothing to do that's affordable. What the fuck else are young people supposed to do?
And the three problems are all each exacerbated by the other two.
For fuck's sake, there's a complex near me [0] that has STUDIO apartments that start at $1,690. This is a suburb. It's not even close to anything. Even the metro line is about a mile walk. The nearest grocery store is over a mile away.
Granted, our minimum wage is somewhat high at $15.45/hr. But even at that rate, it would take 110 hours of pretax wages to pay for it. Post-tax, it'd be at least 75% of your monthly pay.
> Even the metro line is about a mile walk. The nearest grocery store is over a mile away.
I feel like you need to be a bit more precise when it comes to walking distance. Is "over a mile away" closer to 1 mile, or 2? A mile walk isn't far, but a 2 mile walk can be if you're doing it both ways without much in-between.
That being said, that apartment building (and area) is clearly designed with driving in mind. Parking spaces, right next to a 7 lane highway, more asphalt than rooftop.
The concerns of older generations that live in The Villages. That's bordering on finding someone that complained about the quality of the wine served at the country club, and then using that as your basis of what "older generations" are concerned about.
Do you think that cities used to be less "car dependent"? What point in American history are you imagining where people weren't taking cars around?
You could look back to maybe the early 20th century, but what that meant is that you had to live right next to the factory where you worked, which was obviously terrible. Cars meant that you could have separate areas for living and working, and this was considered a good thing.
edit: people keep making the same point, so I'll reply to all of you at once: do you think you could find a single person on any public transportation anywhere in America who wouldn't take a free, brand new Tesla model X with free charging and a free place to park it over riding the bus? Or if they had that brand new Tesla: would any of them trade it straight across for a free lifetime bus pass? Of course not. Having your own car is objectively better in every meaningful way.
The reason people take public transportation is because they can't afford a car, and yes owning a house with a garage is part of affording the car.
I agree with you that car dependency is not the only problem that young people are facing. But it definitely exacerbates the other problems they’re facing.
Financial insecurity, and needing to spend 30 mins and 2 gallons of gas just to see a friend, means that it is prohibitively expensive and hard to see people.
Community has become fractured in many ways, like what’s specifically referenced in the article, but the requirement to drive just to meet up with anyone just compounds the issue further.
I had this same problem when I lived in the US as a young millennial. You could never just accidentally run into your friends, you all had to plan and commit to a whole drive just to see each other.
I moved to Europe, and now I can just ride my bike over to a friends place in 10 mins, or take an approximately free tram/bus. I think this would greatly help those in the US as well
Around this time of day, I’d be taking my time walking home with my friends from Most Blessed Sacrament School, or “MBS” as everyone called it. Once home, I’d quickly get out of my school clothes, put on my play clothes, and be on my way to my favorite place in the world, Myers playground.
I always felt so safe on Cecil Street. On warm summer nights, lots of adults would sit on soft cushions on the top step of the four concrete steps that led from the edge of our front porches down to the sidewalk. Neighbors would sit out for hours, talking with other neighbors, many of them enjoying a cold beer or some other cold drink. At least one neighbor would have the Phillies game blasting on their transistor radio. So we’d be able to keep track of the Phillies game while we were running up and down the street having fun. I knew everybody on Cecil Street, and they all knew me. In fact, I knew almost everybody in our section of the neighborhood. And I felt safe no matter where I went. All us kids knew that most parents around here looked out for all the kids, not just their own.
The way I heard it: right after I was born, Dad simply didn’t renew his license, sold his big black Chevy, and never drove again.
Years later, when I asked Dad about it, he said, “Kev, I could take the “13” trolley on Chester Avenue to work. I could walk to the grocery store. I could walk to the bar. And I was tired of driving your mom and Nonna all over the city. What the hell did I need a car for?”
I have heard personal anecdotes from family relating similar stories.
> Having your own car is objectively better in every meaningful way.
I'm honestly curious: Have you ever spent much time traveling or talking with friends in Europe or other places with much lower car ownership, about this particular point?
I have met while traveling or known socially or through work quite a few people who, sure, they would gladly accept a nice free car (who doesn't want $50k for free...), but would still prefer to walk or ride their bike or take the train most days, because it is actually a lot more convenient than lugging around a vehicle while going about their daily business.
Even in the US, there are tons of wealthy people in our cities who don't own a car (or keep it in the garage nearly all the time), not because they can't afford one, but because it just isn't as convenient.
I disagree, having properly densely designed cities means you don’t need that car. I stayed in a slum in Paris for a week, I was able to walk to the grocer and take the bus to the train station to go into downtown Paris. Car ownership doesn’t work in Paris because it’s designed to be walkable which necessitates less parking lots. Parking lots and parking spaces are things you have to walk past/through and are a big reason car dependent cities in America don’t work.
i have lived in san diego, los angeles and auckland for the greater part of a year each, without a car, and i didn't live downtown in any of those places. before i moved to san diego i thought this is it, i'd have to get a car now. but no, i was able to arrange my life around public transport and avoid a car.
a car is not objectively better.
the greatest pain point from my perspective: parking.
do you know how ridiculously expensive parking is in los angeles? it's insane.
public transport, even as bad as it was in those cities gave me a lot more freedom to go to the places that i wanted to go to within the city at least.
the only benefit for a car would have been to go on road trips, explore the rural areas, etc, but that's not something i'd have wanted to do on my own anyways.
> Having your own car is objectively better in every meaningful way.
Only if it's free. Also, consider the tragedy of the commons. Maybe it's great for the one person getting a free Tesla, but not so much for the taxpayers that pay for the road, the parking, the noise, and the danger to others.
I'm a millenial myself, and not a parent so parents please correct me. 4. Modern parenting is torture for children.
Up until the teenage years kids need to feel useful. They need to be able to help fix things, etc. They need to get into a little bit of trouble and get dinged up a bit.
Teenagers need a lot more freedom. Every ounce of their body is pushing them to distance themselves from their family, have sex and take risks. Instead parents insist on this "no drugs, no sex" policy. Of course both of those things can present major problems, which is why they should be discussed but not forbidden. Even sex ed today is maximizing fear and pushing waiting until marriage which is just as bad.
As the parent points out, living in a car dependent city with nowhere to go and no way to get there leaves you no choice but to stay home. Staying home means tv, internet and video games. Parents are out on a holy war against that as well.
Are you suffocating yet? Now remember that in addition to everything above your texts, location, browsing history, grades, etc. are all being tracked and reported for your parents to further control you. Could you imagine if you were treated like this as an adult. You'd have a civil war.
Let them fuck. Let them work. Let them do drugs. Let them make mistakes for christ sake. All of these things have consequences and are worth keeping in mind. But coddling them until 18 and expecting them to be functional is like raising an elephant from birth isolated until adulthood then releasing them to the african savannah. They'll be dead before sunset.
Instead parents insist on this "no drugs, no sex" policy. Of course both of those things can present major problems, which is why they should be discussed but not forbidden. Even sex ed today is maximizing fear and pushing waiting until marriage which is just as bad.
My impression is that there is far less of this now than there was thirty years ago or fifty years ago.
Beyond wage suppression, it feels like there isn't competition any more. Instead of one company undercutting another to offer a better deal, both or all just raise prices for maximum revenue extraction. For example telecom companies and cell phone plans in Canada. They know its an essential service and charge exhorbently for access, because what are you going to do, not have a cellphone? If every "mandatory for living" service (housing, medical, food, utilities, telecom,...) does that, what's left?
I feel Canadians get particularly shafted: lower wage, higher cost of life on essentials, stupid high rent in first tier city (where the jobs are!).
On the wages only, I wonder what justifies that Canadians make so little in comparison to their American peers living just an hour away across the border. Taxes alone don't seem enough to justify that gap. My take is that Canadians just... accepted it.
> there isn't anywhere to go because car dependent infrastructure has killed all the places that young people used to hang out.
I think it's way more than car dependent infrastructure. It's also the pressures of monetizing everything including social spaces. The only place I know in my town where you will be unharassed for hanging out in the open free of charge for hours out of the weather is the library. The mall will encourage you and your group to leave with security. The coffee shops and lounges require purchases of drink. Even my local makerspace requires at least one purchase to hang out in their scheduled "free" hangout meetups.
Look at the viral TikTok video from a few weeks ago, where a recent marketing graduate was wondering why she wasn't making $100k right out of school. Or I recently saw a Twitter discussion where someone said, "Sure you can raise a family on a $100k, but you'll have to do it in 1000sqft. Who wants to do that?". We, I am, and I'm as happy as I've ever been.
Financial inequality has completely skewed what is seen as "normal". We need to fix both that perception, and the actual inequality.
You are certainly right! However, I find that addressing a problem as vague as financial insecurity leads to non-solutions being proposed that kick the ball down the road a little and make the problem worse. By identifying the systemic issues that cause the financial insecurity we can address them properly.
We have solutions to wage suppression, car dependency and housing costs. We just need the political will to implement them.
But what they can afford are cell phones and Instagram/TikTok where they talk to each other.
On top of the physical impoverishment, young people are being starved of meaning and face to face social interaction. Online "communities" are not real communities. Hell, many face to face ones aren't either, at this point.
Substituting online interaction and faux "community" for the real thing is like giving a baby Karo syrup and water instead of milk. It seems sweet and it's even addictive. Eventually, it will harm or even kill the subject.
> Substituting online interaction and faux "community" for the real thing is like giving a baby Karo syrup and water instead of milk. It seems sweet and it's even addictive. Eventually, it will harm or even kill the subject.
Agreed, but what community do they have as an alternative? Especially after they leave school.
100% correct here.
Young people have been robbed of public space, and her solution to them finding even a facsimile of one to replace it is to... rob them of that too.
What do you mean "robbed of public space"? What public space was taken away? The only public space which seems inaccessible to me that used to be is: parks and sidewalks, both of which have become open air drug markets/tent cities. The city where I live has no parks I am comfortable taking my children to, and we actively avoid walking on the sidewalks because it's dangerous.
> Young people can't go anywhere because they can't afford a car because all their money goes to rent. Even if they WANTED to go somewhere, there isn't anywhere to go because car dependent infrastructure has killed all the places that young people used to hang out.
This is a big one IMO.
We moved to a Northern NJ suburb in the late-90s. However, NYC Metro suburbs are very different from the "suburbs" that are a dime a dozen here in Texas.
The town was small --- about a mile in square area. You could walk pretty much everywhere within it, even though some points were far. Almost every street had a sidewalk that was maintained by the city. Since the city followed a grid system, routes from one persons house to another could be done on foot. I spent a lot of time walking in my teens because of this, though not being allowed to have a car played a big part in that.
(Walking a lot comes naturally to me because of this; in fact, a big reason why I hated living in these suburbs was because of how difficult it was to walk somewhere interesting instead of "mandatory walking" around a fake pond.)
By comparison, suburbs in Texas (or at least here in Houston, and definitely in Dallas) are gigantic. You could walk for miles before you hit literally anything. The nearest business in the suburb we lived in when we moved here was 1.5 miles away on foot. The first 0.5 mile within the neighborhood was fine since the neighborhood had nicely curated sidewalks. Once you left the neighborhood though, you were walking on the 45mph-rated streets that people definitely drive 15+ over on (usually on their phones, since we're on the subject).
None of these neighborhoods have a grid system, so going from one house to another within the neighborhood could take a shocking amount of time despite being a short distance away. This design is done on purpose to "increase safety," which is at best farcical considering how unbelievably spread out these communities are and how distant they are from anything.
I hope the next generation of parents opt for smaller, more walkable towns with smaller houses and proper city centers instead of gigantic, cavernous and mostly empty sets of endless houses. I think this can be done while also remaining affordable, but we, collectively, have to want it.
Otherwise, yeah, the screens will "win" because the Internet is cheap, immediate and has basically anything you can think of.
Generations previous were equally car dependent but got by. The current generations are choosing to not go anywhere because they believe they can get the experience by phone. I think the assumption that "if they could get there, they would" is incorrect; they don't want to.
> Generations previous were equally car dependent but got by.
Only a couple of them! You are aware that the mass adoption of cars was a mid-20th-century phenomenon, yes? US cities were radically reshaped around interstate highways during the '50s and '60s. This car-dependence is quite a recent thing in the human experience.
> Generations previous were equally car dependent but got by.
How much more prosperous would our nation be if we had not invested such a significant amount of our time and wealth into cars? We could have built colonies on the Moon with the amount we spent on building more lanes for people to be stuck in traffic.
Remarkably, these issues you've articulated perfectly-capture the progressive bugbear zeitgeist and yet do not seem to have much (if any) support in the original article.
Is it possible it actually might be the phones somehow as she argues?
The comment you replied to agrees that it's the phones (well, the social media accessed by the phones)... But then it asks, why? It's not orthogonal, it's additive.
And I might suggest that the author of the essay very likely hasn't considered this next level deeper, because "this is water".
If you think car dependency is an imaginary problem (bugbear), I would invite you to walk or ride a bicycle more. You may find that the bugbear is just a bear.
As for housing affordability and wage suppression, these are just established facts. One visit to Zillow to look at a place you used to live is enough. My old apartment that cost $800/month is currently going for $2400/month 8 years later. Minimum wage hasn't changed since 2009 and is currently $7.24/hour.
By my estimation, the problems highlighted by the comment you replied to indeed started around the 70s. I think what happened recently is that the internet and social media came along as the perfect, but also terrible, solution to those problems.
I think the couple generations in between experienced the problems more as boredom and ennui. Indeed, "gen x" is pretty famous for this, and I think "millenials" are just a mish-mash of the late stage of "gen x" and the early stage of the "zoomer" generations.
I would estimate that it started with Brown v. Board of Education in the mid 1950s. As racial integration started we saw "White Flight" from city centers. Naturally, those people exiting the cities wanted a way to enter the cities for jobs, education, entertainment, etc... So then we saw the construction of Urban Freeways in the 60s and 70s.
Before then, cars were unaffordable for almost everyone. It was kind of like owning an airplane nowadays. It was doable, but most didn't bother unless they really needed one since there were more affordable alternatives and you could walk everywhere you needed to go anyways.
Since then, things have only gotten worse as we slowly make cars the only viable method of transportation through land use requirements and neglected infrastructure.
It gets worse: in a society where children are a luxury requiring careful investment and sacrifice to conceive, child abuse will be far more rampant, as there will be growing pressure from parents to make their children some sort of positive ROI, otherwise why even bother having them?
Ugh… you can improve the situation by spreading out. Cheaper housing requires cheaper, less dense, populations. Using cars enables cheaper housing.
If you want cheaper cars and transportation in general, it’s cheaper energy & cheaper vehicles. Both require less regulation.
You can’t save in a city, where your paying a landlord and the wages are perfectly at market equilibrium. You can only get ahead by moving out, living cheaper and making decent pay.
We've already spread out a lot. Should young people be living acres away from the next house and an hours drive from their friends? I'm not sure that'll solve loneliness and disconnection.
Not to mention that these days, even doing that won't save you much, or in some cases, post pandemic you'll be paying a premium.
Less regulations will never get rid of increased cost of individual transportation. Public transportion is the only way to push energy demand significantly.
Advising your boomer strategy "to just save" in the current era is so ignorant. This ignorance combined with the ever prospect of passive growth is imo the reason why rent extracts much more out of a life since the golden 50s.
I'm sure the general hopelessness of younger generations has nothing at all to do with the facts that:
- They get paid less (in terms of actual purchasing power) than any prior generation in memory.
- They are saddled with mountains of education debt their elders told them to take on if they want a good job (which they usually never got).
- They cannot get the security and long-term investment that is owning a house, which was much easier for older generations.
- Food and college and other basics of survival and upward mobility are costing more and more every year, outpacing inflation, which itself is outpacing wages.
I really think this is a much simpler explanation for a generation-wide malaise than the popular (with older generations), but infantilizing, explanation of a social media addiction. Not getting paid a fair amount for your hard work, and it being so obvious that you are indeed not getting paid a fair amount, will be demoralizing to anyone of any background.
The article is mostly centered around the short-term benefits but long-term harms of electronic devices and social media. This is a symptom, not the source of the problem.
The Gen Z adults I know are struggling to survive, and they're left wondering, "_These_ are supposed to be my golden years? Going to the food bank and ignoring my student loan bills?" And the older people they look up to are more often than not completely out of touch. They had time to grow savings when it was easier to do so. Everyone I know has a story about some family member who can't understand how they're struggling because they purchased a house with a part time job with no college degree.
But not all older people are like that. My parents never had time to save and buy a house, and today they find themselves hopelessly incapable of doing so. They would never make remarks you hear all the time about "people don't want to work these days." They have the exact same problem as the Gen Z adults except they have a quickly-approaching deadline where they can't work anymore.
I do think social media can be a problem. Besides this site, I am not active anywhere else. A lot of people in my generation already have deleted their accounts, or they _want_ to but can't because it's free and they feel somewhat dependent on it. But you'd be surprised how many fewer people would be feeling depressed if they didn't need to fight to put food on the table.
Disclaimer: Not technically Gen Z, but I don't think I'm far off. The author states they received their first iPhone at 10. I was already spending hours every day on the internet by that age, and bought my first smartphone at 14.
I think the whole "people don't want to work these days" takes the grand prize for the most ridiculous and disingenuous catch phrases of the 2020s. It totally (and deliberately) ignores market forces like offered wages and costs of living.
I would not want to work either, if the best I could do was $20/week for 30 hours a week (30, so the employer can avoid paying benefits). $600/week pre-tax won't even pay rent in many cities, let alone other basic living expenses.
I agree with your points but I want to highlight that this perception is part of the cause of the housing issues. People really do want to consider their house to be an investment which incentivizes them to be opposed to changes which might lower their house price. I do not own a house but see a house as a long-term security choice more than an investment. It doesn't need to be an investment for me to prefer a house to an apartment.
As I read the article I thought it was written by someone my age
(Gen-X) projecting onto a younger generation their own fears,
suspicions, bugbears and theories about why their kid's lives suck,
without really understanding.
Broken hearted at what I've seen as university professor for the past
10-15 years... a generation who seem empty and bereft, I wrote a book
to try to help [0]. The central metaphor of it is that the data you
consume is much like the food you eat, and entreating people to be
more selective about their consumption.
But most of what I wrote there was dismissed by my own generation,
especially fellow developers and technical people, as "Luddite".
Those of us seriously challenging the "smart-phone crisis" are always
dubbed marginal throwbacks and non-conformist oddballs.
Yet if this article is genuine, and representative it turns out we
were right all along. I am not sure if I am happy or sad. Sometimes
you just really want to be wrong.
I feel I should take more courage, and renewed vigour to be even more
vocal in denouncing smartphones as a scourge. And yet I remain
sceptical, perhaps out of hopeless optimism that this catastrophe
isn't happening.
Are there any articles countering this one? Written by Gen-Z who are
delighted with being addicted to always-on tracking and surveillance
devices that fill their minds with doom and poison?
The author of OP's link has a net worth of $1.5 million. She absolutely has no idea of the problems non-millionaire zoomers have. She appears to genuinely believe taking away the phone will solve everything (it won't).
I mean. It’s not like young people are the exclusive demographic of doomscrollers.
When I take my kids to the park or their sports, grandma and grandpa are usually the ones scrolling Facebook.
There’s no shortage of “grandma, I can see you not watching! Watch!”
Doom scrolling is impacting everyone. Quitting Facebook and Reddit is the best thing I did for my sanity. That shit was all bigotry and racism at this point anyway.
I'll assume for a moment it's not a rhetorical question and state the obvious - phones (i.e. apps) have been designed to be addictive.
It's not a failure of willpower but rather it's you losing (predictively) to decades of market research and teams of PhDs employed to exploit your brain. It's asymmetrical warfare. It's like cigarettes of the past except instead of chemists optimising addictive additives it's programmers optimising attention stealing notifications and dark patterns.
It's more than a loss of hope. Somehow we've succumb to a rampant performative cynicism that has made it low status to like anything that makes life meaningful.
I'm not hearing anything particularly modern in this take. The author lacks a sense of personal foundation upon which to build a life for themselves. Their list of "debunked" foundations - family, country, church, work - were never universally applicable to everyone. Not for the last fifty years, hundred years, all of human history were people doomed to be unhappy if they did not get married, or did not serve their country, or did not join a priesthood, or did not find professional success. Plenty of people found and find happiness in spite of not having one or more of these achievements.
The author would be advised to find something creative that engages them. No, doomscrolling doesn't count, and "creative" is a pretty broad term. Even for, especially for, someone who believes that everything is doomed - activism can be creative. It requires little more than intrinsic motivation, energy, time, and the dedication to see it through.
It may have been a mistake to give children social media from too early an age, but at some point, it became the author's responsibility to give up an energy sink that is not serving them anymore and find a better use for their time.
i think part of the problem is these kind of messages are alienating exactly because they appear on screen. the meat-space sentiments rarely match the "thoughts and prayers" type online speech-acts, or at least, they are basically never extended as readily.
Nothing personal (I mean, seriously, nothing personal)
Little (probably hard) advice for if/when you're going to say something like that to a zoomer irl (based on personal experience from the receiving end):
The "you aren't as alone as it might seem" gets the "what you're saying is just factually incorrect and what you're trying to do is to bullshit me and maybe possibly yourself" thing going. I have never heard something like that from a person "in the weeds".
Same for "We'll figure it out". How much time have you personally spent "figuring it out" and how much time have you spent playing hot potato with the problem? How important is it compared to your own problems? I guess, not very, so there is no "us" figuring it out.
Basically, don't be a disingenuous dense motherfucker and don't bullshit other people and yourself. Not saying you personally are doing it, but there are definitely more people that do, than that don't.
> Whatever precipitating causes led to such suffering, know that we're _here_, _now_, together.
The article comments on this though:
"All the things that have traditionally made life worth living — love, community, country, faith, work, and family — have been “debunked.”
This is absolutely true and no wonder young folks are feeling down. I think the counter-culture types starting 50+ years ago wanted to tear down the old, but forgot to put something constructive in its place. (Well the leftist/Marxist types tried, but then the USSR imploded)
For anyone like me that was wondering how average screen time on phones compares to average "screen time" watching television in the late 90's:
- 2000: "Almost all 6-17 year olds (99%) watch television in their leisure time, and on average spend *two and half hours almost every day* in front of the screen."
- 2023: "On average, children ages 8-12 in the United States spend 4-6 hours a day watching or using screens, and *teens spend up to 9 hours.*"
I think this screen time increase, and, specifically, the lack of regulation around social media consumption is a crisis. Data on the harms that social media is directly and indirectly accountable for is abundant. The increase in children getting a tablet thrown in front of them is particularly concerning to me.
This might be me (a Millennial) channeling Socrates[^2] about the next generation, but I am increasingly strongly believing that insufficient life skills development and the achievement gap in general will be significantly wider in the coming years because of this, and that wage/class inequalities will increase with it.
I scrolled through her twitter a bit and can't see a single instance
of her posting a picture with a "fellow gen z-er", just her with
middle-aged conservative pundits. I know multiple non-monogamous
people and not a single one has ever said monogamy is outdated or ever
tried to coerce someone away from monogamy. Nothing about her story
sounds honest to me.
The conclusion of the article is "phones bad, take them away and
everything good" which is the same talking point politicians from the
era of leaded fuel want you to believe. She appears to solely blame
phones for zoomer depression and completely ignores everything
else. It's gross. I don't know why any reasonable person would ignore
everything else other than them wanting to push an agenda or they're
completely oblivious to the situation.
It's probably both, she's a wealthy individual (sites state her net
worth is $1.5 million, how many zoomers do you know that have such a
net worth or can ever achieve such a net worth?) and constantly tweets
conservative culture war stuff on Twitter.
Another thing I'm reminded of is the articles that sometimes make the
rounds with headlines like "This teen just purchased their own house!"
and other "rags to riches stories" and every single time it turns out
their parents are extremely wealthy and inherited the wealth from
their own parents. It's grossly dishonest.
Readit News
1. Car dependent cities.
2. Housing crisis
3. Wage suppression
Young people can't go anywhere because they can't afford a car because all their money goes to rent. Even if they WANTED to go somewhere, there isn't anywhere to go because car dependent infrastructure has killed all the places that young people used to hang out.
They don't make enough money to survive, much less thrive. I know a lot of GenZ people living in rotting camper trailers, sheds, tents, and cars. Many of my millennial friends are going through the same thing. They have no savings, no house, and they could never afford to start a family. A child is a ruinous event instead of joyous. There is no safety net and the tight rope is made of silly string.
But what they can afford are cell phones and Instagram/TikTok where they talk to each other.
Teens are not sitting around sulking because they can't ride the train somewhere. They're all glued to their phones doomscrolling until they can't take it anymore
I was lucky to be able to walk to school as a kid in the 90s, and found that time to be a delicious moment of early freedom each day as kids from my neighborhood and I chose our route and cut through backyards and patches of woods to pick up other kids. I lived in a small town without wide or fast roads, so this was largely safe, but I understand why it's not possible in most suburbs today. I loved my ability to ride my bike to friends' houses and down to the town beach in the summer, without having to ask my parents for a ride.
I think I would have been a very unhappy kid growing up in the typical American suburb of today, shepherded between structured activities and constantly monitored by adults. Retreating to a private online world may be an unhealthy coping mechanism, but it makes sense.
^ http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_...
It takes as a given the article's point that the proximate cause of the issue is phone / social media centrism (IMO this is also right), but then it asks why? Why is youth culture so centered on devices and social media?
It wasn't phones or the contemporary version of social media for me (missed that by just under five years), but I already felt this when I was an adolescent. For me it was the late-90s wave of internet-connected video games, and the forums about the ones I played - absolutely a form of social media. And I very much relate to, "well what else would I be doing?". Everything else I could do required a parent to do it with me, and while they spent a huge amount of their time on involvement in fruitful things for me to do, in the form of things like sports and organized group activities (boy scouts, etc.), they also very reasonably had their own lives and couldn't just chaperone their kids all night every night and all day every weekend day. And then, what in the world else was I going to do? Where could I go to just hang out with friends, when I was 13, and what could we do on our own? Nowhere and nothing. My impression is that this has only gotten worse.
The respite from this was college, and I'm convinced this is why pretty much everyone fortunate enough to go to a residential college looks back on it very fondly. Colleges have everything their students need, within short walks, and like an infinite number of places for young people to just independently hang out with each other, without having to pay for anything. It's such a revelation! But you do that for just a few years, and then you discover that it only worked because it was absurdly subsidized, either by someone else - parents, taxpayers, wealthy scholarship / grant funders - or by your own future earnings. And out in the real world, all the gathering spaces - bars, coffee shops, restaurants - suddenly become impractically expensive, and all the distances between people become impractically large.
vs kids in Japan, Europe etc who are meaningfully independent from a far, far earlier age and have far, far more opportunities for socialization than kids in the US do
this is not to say they do not also have their own issues (in many cases device related), but yeah, let's not pretend like car-centrism has nothing to do with it, because it absolutely does
My kids aren't allowed to use social media and we are "the mean parents" now because of it since "everybody else's parents let them." Some of these kids were on Instagram in 4th grade. It took years of explaining what we were protecting them from before they started to really get it, seeing their friends at school who's entire life is on a 4 inch screen.
They understand now, but the pressure is very real.
> Parents ask me: Why are my kids so anxious and depressed? Where do they go all day on their devices? How can I get them back?
The answer is to give them somewhere else to go!
I had a medium-range breakfast the other day... waffles coffee and a mimosa with bacon on the side: $66. Jesus that's more than 4 hours with the local minimum wage before taxes. Realistically the take home from an entire shift -- for a standard breakfast.
If I go out to a bar, every drink is $10.
If I want to go visit a friend, there's no parking anywhere on a Friday night unless you live miles and miles away from the city center. And people keep getting shot/stabbed on public transit. You can laud it all you want but it feels unsafe for a tall dude in his 30s... a lot of young people aren't going to feel comfortable with the local public transit.
The rent is too high, there's nothing to do that's affordable. What the fuck else are young people supposed to do?
Dead Comment
For fuck's sake, there's a complex near me [0] that has STUDIO apartments that start at $1,690. This is a suburb. It's not even close to anything. Even the metro line is about a mile walk. The nearest grocery store is over a mile away.
Granted, our minimum wage is somewhat high at $15.45/hr. But even at that rate, it would take 110 hours of pretax wages to pay for it. Post-tax, it'd be at least 75% of your monthly pay.
[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/EYCy2kvXsRYCjz4J7
I feel like you need to be a bit more precise when it comes to walking distance. Is "over a mile away" closer to 1 mile, or 2? A mile walk isn't far, but a 2 mile walk can be if you're doing it both ways without much in-between.
That being said, that apartment building (and area) is clearly designed with driving in mind. Parking spaces, right next to a 7 lane highway, more asphalt than rooftop.
It's odd to me that at these prices, roommates (the kind you share a room with) are not more common.
The horror.
https://www.villages-news.com/2023/11/05/do-not-buy-a-home-i...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida
https://www.thevillages.com/
Do you think that cities used to be less "car dependent"? What point in American history are you imagining where people weren't taking cars around?
You could look back to maybe the early 20th century, but what that meant is that you had to live right next to the factory where you worked, which was obviously terrible. Cars meant that you could have separate areas for living and working, and this was considered a good thing.
edit: people keep making the same point, so I'll reply to all of you at once: do you think you could find a single person on any public transportation anywhere in America who wouldn't take a free, brand new Tesla model X with free charging and a free place to park it over riding the bus? Or if they had that brand new Tesla: would any of them trade it straight across for a free lifetime bus pass? Of course not. Having your own car is objectively better in every meaningful way.
The reason people take public transportation is because they can't afford a car, and yes owning a house with a garage is part of affording the car.
Financial insecurity, and needing to spend 30 mins and 2 gallons of gas just to see a friend, means that it is prohibitively expensive and hard to see people.
Community has become fractured in many ways, like what’s specifically referenced in the article, but the requirement to drive just to meet up with anyone just compounds the issue further.
I had this same problem when I lived in the US as a young millennial. You could never just accidentally run into your friends, you all had to plan and commit to a whole drive just to see each other.
I moved to Europe, and now I can just ride my bike over to a friends place in 10 mins, or take an approximately free tram/bus. I think this would greatly help those in the US as well
Here is a small quote:
Around this time of day, I’d be taking my time walking home with my friends from Most Blessed Sacrament School, or “MBS” as everyone called it. Once home, I’d quickly get out of my school clothes, put on my play clothes, and be on my way to my favorite place in the world, Myers playground.
I always felt so safe on Cecil Street. On warm summer nights, lots of adults would sit on soft cushions on the top step of the four concrete steps that led from the edge of our front porches down to the sidewalk. Neighbors would sit out for hours, talking with other neighbors, many of them enjoying a cold beer or some other cold drink. At least one neighbor would have the Phillies game blasting on their transistor radio. So we’d be able to keep track of the Phillies game while we were running up and down the street having fun. I knew everybody on Cecil Street, and they all knew me. In fact, I knew almost everybody in our section of the neighborhood. And I felt safe no matter where I went. All us kids knew that most parents around here looked out for all the kids, not just their own.
The way I heard it: right after I was born, Dad simply didn’t renew his license, sold his big black Chevy, and never drove again.
Years later, when I asked Dad about it, he said, “Kev, I could take the “13” trolley on Chester Avenue to work. I could walk to the grocery store. I could walk to the bar. And I was tired of driving your mom and Nonna all over the city. What the hell did I need a car for?”
I have heard personal anecdotes from family relating similar stories.
I'm honestly curious: Have you ever spent much time traveling or talking with friends in Europe or other places with much lower car ownership, about this particular point?
I have met while traveling or known socially or through work quite a few people who, sure, they would gladly accept a nice free car (who doesn't want $50k for free...), but would still prefer to walk or ride their bike or take the train most days, because it is actually a lot more convenient than lugging around a vehicle while going about their daily business.
Even in the US, there are tons of wealthy people in our cities who don't own a car (or keep it in the garage nearly all the time), not because they can't afford one, but because it just isn't as convenient.
a car is not objectively better. the greatest pain point from my perspective: parking.
do you know how ridiculously expensive parking is in los angeles? it's insane.
public transport, even as bad as it was in those cities gave me a lot more freedom to go to the places that i wanted to go to within the city at least.
the only benefit for a car would have been to go on road trips, explore the rural areas, etc, but that's not something i'd have wanted to do on my own anyways.
Absolutely, yes.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/2/20/the-history-of...
> Having your own car is objectively better in every meaningful way.
Only if it's free. Also, consider the tragedy of the commons. Maybe it's great for the one person getting a free Tesla, but not so much for the taxpayers that pay for the road, the parking, the noise, and the danger to others.
Los Angeles, now a car-dependent hellscape, once had a robust and far-reaching street car network.
Post-WW2 we went full car-dependent suburbs. Why? Racism has a lot to do with it.
Up until the teenage years kids need to feel useful. They need to be able to help fix things, etc. They need to get into a little bit of trouble and get dinged up a bit.
Teenagers need a lot more freedom. Every ounce of their body is pushing them to distance themselves from their family, have sex and take risks. Instead parents insist on this "no drugs, no sex" policy. Of course both of those things can present major problems, which is why they should be discussed but not forbidden. Even sex ed today is maximizing fear and pushing waiting until marriage which is just as bad.
As the parent points out, living in a car dependent city with nowhere to go and no way to get there leaves you no choice but to stay home. Staying home means tv, internet and video games. Parents are out on a holy war against that as well.
Are you suffocating yet? Now remember that in addition to everything above your texts, location, browsing history, grades, etc. are all being tracked and reported for your parents to further control you. Could you imagine if you were treated like this as an adult. You'd have a civil war.
Let them fuck. Let them work. Let them do drugs. Let them make mistakes for christ sake. All of these things have consequences and are worth keeping in mind. But coddling them until 18 and expecting them to be functional is like raising an elephant from birth isolated until adulthood then releasing them to the african savannah. They'll be dead before sunset.
My impression is that there is far less of this now than there was thirty years ago or fifty years ago.
On the wages only, I wonder what justifies that Canadians make so little in comparison to their American peers living just an hour away across the border. Taxes alone don't seem enough to justify that gap. My take is that Canadians just... accepted it.
I think it's way more than car dependent infrastructure. It's also the pressures of monetizing everything including social spaces. The only place I know in my town where you will be unharassed for hanging out in the open free of charge for hours out of the weather is the library. The mall will encourage you and your group to leave with security. The coffee shops and lounges require purchases of drink. Even my local makerspace requires at least one purchase to hang out in their scheduled "free" hangout meetups.
Nominal fees are like congestion pricing. If you don't have them, the space loses its ability to fulfill its original purpose.
I'd say it's actually just two things: financial insecurity and climate change.
Both feel hopeless and both make them feel like there is no future no matter what they do.
I think financial expectations are warped, too.
Look at the viral TikTok video from a few weeks ago, where a recent marketing graduate was wondering why she wasn't making $100k right out of school. Or I recently saw a Twitter discussion where someone said, "Sure you can raise a family on a $100k, but you'll have to do it in 1000sqft. Who wants to do that?". We, I am, and I'm as happy as I've ever been.
Financial inequality has completely skewed what is seen as "normal". We need to fix both that perception, and the actual inequality.
We have solutions to wage suppression, car dependency and housing costs. We just need the political will to implement them.
On top of the physical impoverishment, young people are being starved of meaning and face to face social interaction. Online "communities" are not real communities. Hell, many face to face ones aren't either, at this point.
Substituting online interaction and faux "community" for the real thing is like giving a baby Karo syrup and water instead of milk. It seems sweet and it's even addictive. Eventually, it will harm or even kill the subject.
Agreed, but what community do they have as an alternative? Especially after they leave school.
What do you mean "robbed of public space"? What public space was taken away? The only public space which seems inaccessible to me that used to be is: parks and sidewalks, both of which have become open air drug markets/tent cities. The city where I live has no parks I am comfortable taking my children to, and we actively avoid walking on the sidewalks because it's dangerous.
This is a big one IMO.
We moved to a Northern NJ suburb in the late-90s. However, NYC Metro suburbs are very different from the "suburbs" that are a dime a dozen here in Texas.
The town was small --- about a mile in square area. You could walk pretty much everywhere within it, even though some points were far. Almost every street had a sidewalk that was maintained by the city. Since the city followed a grid system, routes from one persons house to another could be done on foot. I spent a lot of time walking in my teens because of this, though not being allowed to have a car played a big part in that.
(Walking a lot comes naturally to me because of this; in fact, a big reason why I hated living in these suburbs was because of how difficult it was to walk somewhere interesting instead of "mandatory walking" around a fake pond.)
By comparison, suburbs in Texas (or at least here in Houston, and definitely in Dallas) are gigantic. You could walk for miles before you hit literally anything. The nearest business in the suburb we lived in when we moved here was 1.5 miles away on foot. The first 0.5 mile within the neighborhood was fine since the neighborhood had nicely curated sidewalks. Once you left the neighborhood though, you were walking on the 45mph-rated streets that people definitely drive 15+ over on (usually on their phones, since we're on the subject).
None of these neighborhoods have a grid system, so going from one house to another within the neighborhood could take a shocking amount of time despite being a short distance away. This design is done on purpose to "increase safety," which is at best farcical considering how unbelievably spread out these communities are and how distant they are from anything.
I hope the next generation of parents opt for smaller, more walkable towns with smaller houses and proper city centers instead of gigantic, cavernous and mostly empty sets of endless houses. I think this can be done while also remaining affordable, but we, collectively, have to want it.
Otherwise, yeah, the screens will "win" because the Internet is cheap, immediate and has basically anything you can think of.
This doesn't make sense to me.
Generations previous were equally car dependent but got by. The current generations are choosing to not go anywhere because they believe they can get the experience by phone. I think the assumption that "if they could get there, they would" is incorrect; they don't want to.
Only a couple of them! You are aware that the mass adoption of cars was a mid-20th-century phenomenon, yes? US cities were radically reshaped around interstate highways during the '50s and '60s. This car-dependence is quite a recent thing in the human experience.
How much more prosperous would our nation be if we had not invested such a significant amount of our time and wealth into cars? We could have built colonies on the Moon with the amount we spent on building more lanes for people to be stuck in traffic.
Deleted Comment
Is it possible it actually might be the phones somehow as she argues?
And I might suggest that the author of the essay very likely hasn't considered this next level deeper, because "this is water".
As for housing affordability and wage suppression, these are just established facts. One visit to Zillow to look at a place you used to live is enough. My old apartment that cost $800/month is currently going for $2400/month 8 years later. Minimum wage hasn't changed since 2009 and is currently $7.24/hour.
Real wage growth has been stalled out since the 1970s, several generations before Gen Z.
I think the couple generations in between experienced the problems more as boredom and ennui. Indeed, "gen x" is pretty famous for this, and I think "millenials" are just a mish-mash of the late stage of "gen x" and the early stage of the "zoomer" generations.
Before then, cars were unaffordable for almost everyone. It was kind of like owning an airplane nowadays. It was doable, but most didn't bother unless they really needed one since there were more affordable alternatives and you could walk everywhere you needed to go anyways.
Since then, things have only gotten worse as we slowly make cars the only viable method of transportation through land use requirements and neglected infrastructure.
1. Phones and social media 2. Anomie
Dead Comment
> 2. Housing crisis
Ugh… you can improve the situation by spreading out. Cheaper housing requires cheaper, less dense, populations. Using cars enables cheaper housing.
If you want cheaper cars and transportation in general, it’s cheaper energy & cheaper vehicles. Both require less regulation.
You can’t save in a city, where your paying a landlord and the wages are perfectly at market equilibrium. You can only get ahead by moving out, living cheaper and making decent pay.
It’s exactly what the older generations realized.
This could not possibly be more the opposite of the case.
Not to mention that these days, even doing that won't save you much, or in some cases, post pandemic you'll be paying a premium.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/10/21/the-other-rea...
Cars and their supporting infra take up space.
Less regulations will never get rid of increased cost of individual transportation. Public transportion is the only way to push energy demand significantly.
Advising your boomer strategy "to just save" in the current era is so ignorant. This ignorance combined with the ever prospect of passive growth is imo the reason why rent extracts much more out of a life since the golden 50s.
- They get paid less (in terms of actual purchasing power) than any prior generation in memory.
- They are saddled with mountains of education debt their elders told them to take on if they want a good job (which they usually never got).
- They cannot get the security and long-term investment that is owning a house, which was much easier for older generations.
- Food and college and other basics of survival and upward mobility are costing more and more every year, outpacing inflation, which itself is outpacing wages.
I really think this is a much simpler explanation for a generation-wide malaise than the popular (with older generations), but infantilizing, explanation of a social media addiction. Not getting paid a fair amount for your hard work, and it being so obvious that you are indeed not getting paid a fair amount, will be demoralizing to anyone of any background.
The Gen Z adults I know are struggling to survive, and they're left wondering, "_These_ are supposed to be my golden years? Going to the food bank and ignoring my student loan bills?" And the older people they look up to are more often than not completely out of touch. They had time to grow savings when it was easier to do so. Everyone I know has a story about some family member who can't understand how they're struggling because they purchased a house with a part time job with no college degree.
But not all older people are like that. My parents never had time to save and buy a house, and today they find themselves hopelessly incapable of doing so. They would never make remarks you hear all the time about "people don't want to work these days." They have the exact same problem as the Gen Z adults except they have a quickly-approaching deadline where they can't work anymore.
I do think social media can be a problem. Besides this site, I am not active anywhere else. A lot of people in my generation already have deleted their accounts, or they _want_ to but can't because it's free and they feel somewhat dependent on it. But you'd be surprised how many fewer people would be feeling depressed if they didn't need to fight to put food on the table.
Disclaimer: Not technically Gen Z, but I don't think I'm far off. The author states they received their first iPhone at 10. I was already spending hours every day on the internet by that age, and bought my first smartphone at 14.
I would not want to work either, if the best I could do was $20/week for 30 hours a week (30, so the employer can avoid paying benefits). $600/week pre-tax won't even pay rent in many cities, let alone other basic living expenses.
I agree with your points but I want to highlight that this perception is part of the cause of the housing issues. People really do want to consider their house to be an investment which incentivizes them to be opposed to changes which might lower their house price. I do not own a house but see a house as a long-term security choice more than an investment. It doesn't need to be an investment for me to prefer a house to an apartment.
Still, I agree with the points, housing included!
Broken hearted at what I've seen as university professor for the past 10-15 years... a generation who seem empty and bereft, I wrote a book to try to help [0]. The central metaphor of it is that the data you consume is much like the food you eat, and entreating people to be more selective about their consumption.
But most of what I wrote there was dismissed by my own generation, especially fellow developers and technical people, as "Luddite". Those of us seriously challenging the "smart-phone crisis" are always dubbed marginal throwbacks and non-conformist oddballs.
Yet if this article is genuine, and representative it turns out we were right all along. I am not sure if I am happy or sad. Sometimes you just really want to be wrong.
I feel I should take more courage, and renewed vigour to be even more vocal in denouncing smartphones as a scourge. And yet I remain sceptical, perhaps out of hopeless optimism that this catastrophe isn't happening.
Are there any articles countering this one? Written by Gen-Z who are delighted with being addicted to always-on tracking and surveillance devices that fill their minds with doom and poison?
[0] Digital Vegan (https://digitalvegan.net)
When I take my kids to the park or their sports, grandma and grandpa are usually the ones scrolling Facebook.
There’s no shortage of “grandma, I can see you not watching! Watch!”
Doom scrolling is impacting everyone. Quitting Facebook and Reddit is the best thing I did for my sanity. That shit was all bigotry and racism at this point anyway.
It's not a failure of willpower but rather it's you losing (predictively) to decades of market research and teams of PhDs employed to exploit your brain. It's asymmetrical warfare. It's like cigarettes of the past except instead of chemists optimising addictive additives it's programmers optimising attention stealing notifications and dark patterns.
The author would be advised to find something creative that engages them. No, doomscrolling doesn't count, and "creative" is a pretty broad term. Even for, especially for, someone who believes that everything is doomed - activism can be creative. It requires little more than intrinsic motivation, energy, time, and the dedication to see it through.
It may have been a mistake to give children social media from too early an age, but at some point, it became the author's responsibility to give up an energy sink that is not serving them anymore and find a better use for their time.
Zoomers are in this very forum - hi Zoomers.
Hang in there.
Whatever precipitating causes led to such suffering, know that we're _here_, _now_, together.
You aren't as alone as it might seem.
And hey, try to relax a little. We'll figure it out.
Little (probably hard) advice for if/when you're going to say something like that to a zoomer irl (based on personal experience from the receiving end):
The "you aren't as alone as it might seem" gets the "what you're saying is just factually incorrect and what you're trying to do is to bullshit me and maybe possibly yourself" thing going. I have never heard something like that from a person "in the weeds".
Same for "We'll figure it out". How much time have you personally spent "figuring it out" and how much time have you spent playing hot potato with the problem? How important is it compared to your own problems? I guess, not very, so there is no "us" figuring it out.
Basically, don't be a disingenuous dense motherfucker and don't bullshit other people and yourself. Not saying you personally are doing it, but there are definitely more people that do, than that don't.
Attitude is a potion or a poison.
Make the choice.
Want demons? You'll find them.
Want help? You'll find it.
Many, many people have spent time figuring it out.
Many, MANY people have went into professions or made life style choices to help.
The will to overcome your own narcissism and self pity are key to any healing.
The article comments on this though:
"All the things that have traditionally made life worth living — love, community, country, faith, work, and family — have been “debunked.”
This is absolutely true and no wonder young folks are feeling down. I think the counter-culture types starting 50+ years ago wanted to tear down the old, but forgot to put something constructive in its place. (Well the leftist/Marxist types tried, but then the USSR imploded)
From the article...
Monogamy is the corollary for the debunking of love.
That's very silly. Love is much more than marriage.
"Church" foibles is the corollary for the debunking of Faith.
That's also very silly. Faith is much more than church or religion.
In other times and other cultures, spiritual insight removed the roots of suffering.
- 2000: "Almost all 6-17 year olds (99%) watch television in their leisure time, and on average spend *two and half hours almost every day* in front of the screen."
- 2023: "On average, children ages 8-12 in the United States spend 4-6 hours a day watching or using screens, and *teens spend up to 9 hours.*"
I think this screen time increase, and, specifically, the lack of regulation around social media consumption is a crisis. Data on the harms that social media is directly and indirectly accountable for is abundant. The increase in children getting a tablet thrown in front of them is particularly concerning to me.
This might be me (a Millennial) channeling Socrates[^2] about the next generation, but I am increasingly strongly believing that insufficient life skills development and the achievement gap in general will be significantly wider in the coming years because of this, and that wage/class inequalities will increase with it.
[^0]: https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/21172/1/Young_people_New_media.pdf
[^1]: https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Fam...
[^2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a4vnuv/old_g.... Yes, I know it's misattributed to Socrates and is a much more recent quote than oft-believed.
The conclusion of the article is "phones bad, take them away and everything good" which is the same talking point politicians from the era of leaded fuel want you to believe. She appears to solely blame phones for zoomer depression and completely ignores everything else. It's gross. I don't know why any reasonable person would ignore everything else other than them wanting to push an agenda or they're completely oblivious to the situation.
It's probably both, she's a wealthy individual (sites state her net worth is $1.5 million, how many zoomers do you know that have such a net worth or can ever achieve such a net worth?) and constantly tweets conservative culture war stuff on Twitter.
Another thing I'm reminded of is the articles that sometimes make the rounds with headlines like "This teen just purchased their own house!" and other "rags to riches stories" and every single time it turns out their parents are extremely wealthy and inherited the wealth from their own parents. It's grossly dishonest.