Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf] (opens in new tab)

Back in the day you didn't get rape threats from 50 anonymous accounts, or see pictures of you photoshopped sucking dicks, or feel like even more of a loser because you see in 4K detail how everybody else in class is having more fun outside of school. The internet is a threat and embarrassment and envy machine. You feel like you're constantly losing a battle to be relevant and have a good time, and you pathologically monitor feeds of other people's lives to try to stay ahead. When that doesn't work you lose yourself in mindless entertainment to avoid mental stress, also avoiding processing hard emotions.

That's not all new, but it's at a level higher than ever before.

The kids we have seen mostly don’t engage with social media directly. But the ones who transition from cute 5-6 year olds to problematic 10-12 year olds have a key common factor. Tablets. You see kids as young as 2-3 hiding under a table engaged in some awful kiddie YouTube trash or a game. It ends up being a pacifier that induces anxiety, and I think that effect combined with social media is powerful and difficult for kids to manage.

In terms of targeting, i actually think that things are better today. Through lawsuits and reporting, I learned that my childhood Boy Scout Troop and church was infested with pedophiles. The Boy Scout leader basically roamed the country and landed in NYC where he was eventually arrested for an unrelated rape. Today, there’s extensive background checking everywhere and it’s more difficult for a known offender to be in that position of trust.

Sports and the college recruitment funnel are another thing hurting kids. I had a kid drop out of little league because his soccer academy coach flipped out that he, as a 10 year old, isn’t fully committed to soccer. So he’s playing “elite” soccer, at a cost of almost $4k, because that’s how you make the high school team.

On HN that's likely to be a popular opinion, given how many members here probably work in social media corporations.

I have lots of experience looking after relatives' kids in the UK and your points don't apply at all to them.

It's anecdata vs anecdata, but yours doesn't refute the article, and given your opinion may well suit HN biases well (we don't want to think of our work as causing mental illness) then I think the top voted comment needs a stronger counter argument than "my kids are like this".

It's not certain, but it looks pretty damn likely that social media has caused a dramatic increase in mental health problems amongst kids.

Maybe teachers could contribute something here with their experience? Parents see such a tiny sample size but teachers see 1000s of kids over a few years.

Whoever implemented the surveillance of children should burn in hell. Since that probably doesn't exist the next prison with strong similarities should be chosen. You teach them that this kind of 24/7 surveillance is normal and I think they have enough problems with peer pressure through social media. You also teach a zero trust behavior. That can be good in a context and it can be really bad if it becomes learned cynicism.

I could understand it until age 10 perhaps but at some point you want your kids to be independent. If they aren't bots by that age.

1. My kids have slack in their schedule. No, they aren't going to Ivy League schools. That's OK. They will survive somehow.

2. This is certainly true, but it's a complete joke to my kids. They aren't confused. They just wonder why all the adults are. Teenagers already think adults are incompetent.

3. This isn't true at my school. My kids have made egregious errors and the school takes it in stride. They know they are kids. They understand kids make mistakes. It's OK. We work through it and move on. The cops are not called and nothing is escalated. At most, the send us an email and we talk to our kids and that's the end of it.

3. I have no idea on this one.

My children don't have social media accounts and never will on my watch. Even as teenagers they don't because they are not allowed. They could, yes, but they don't. However, I have boys, not girls. Perhaps that would be a non-starter if I had daughters.

When I have no stress (on rare occasions I’m able to detach from my problems), my desire to use my phone at all is non-existent. So I think you are right that’s it’s difficult to attribute causality when kids are constantly under stress.

This study, in fact, appears to only assess correlation. Haidt also strikes me as someone guided by a maverick worldview (he’s a serious thinker usually and I’ll read anything he writes)

It's the War On Drugs all over again.

We understand addiction enough to be able to say that a person's mental, emotional, and psychosocial states are the greatest causes of addiction and not the drug itself.

Social media leads to an increase in a cortisol and dopamine. It also increased oxytocin by a large margin. Behaviors linked to its use are similar to that of other substances that increase those hormones directly.

Can you fill in the blank? I actually have no idea what you are referring to here.

Youth culture seems dead.

I remember being a teen and early-20 in the 90s-2000s and there were things like a hippie festival circuit, raves, goth culture, club culture, and so on.

I keep hoping I'm just old and don't see it, but I remember back then it would seep out and get covered by the media and get chatted about on the nascent Internet. I see nothing like it today. Sure there are concerts and IDM shows and the like, but they don't have a mystique. It's just entertainment, not a coming of age subculture. Subculture is dead.

I think this is a factor from personal experience. If I hadn't gotten into the rave/club culture in the late 90s I'd probably be dead from suicide.

These cultures were where kids that did not exactly fit the popular mold would be able to go out, make friends, have experiences, and have a sense of belonging. I still miss it to this day.

He's one of the leading authorities on the matter, and your take is...nah, not true.

They have your kid for the majority of the working day, that's more than enough time for work. When they're home the last thing they should be doing is school.

I'm sure depression is more acute in that population but even poor teens are growing up with social media.

I'm from Europe but I grew up and have lived in different cultures/countries which have a much more relaxed attitude towards life. Reading your comment actually made me anxious.

Please just build a social media platform just for kids. We don't need weird adults playing in the same sandbox as little kids. We also don't need helpless adults dancing in the same recreational teen dance.

I'm surprised we even allow this to happen in the first place. Go figures.

1) How come adults don’t have the same issues with mental health? (I think we do)

2) If adults face the same issues, is this not life preparation?

I’ll grab the lowest hanging fruit, cancel culture. How many careers were ruined because of this? Is all this control on speech causing damage we’re not even aware of yet?

This was the same for a long time. The main difference now is that they are also very targeted by ads on social media.

They are also manipulated purposely by our enemies. Take TikTok (owned by China). In China it promotes being a scientist and athlete to kids, off at 10pm. In USA it promotes how to set your farts on fire and drink your own piss.

By "kids" you mean upper middle class suburban kids. Working class kids aren't overscheduled in this way. The bulk of kids in the US don't live the life you describe, and for the most part are under supervised. Your anecdotal information is tainted by the bubble you live in.

#1 - don't have a say in this as a parent, like don't enroll your kid in those things if you / they don't like it? Or is there a lot of pressure?

Personally I do think social media is more to blame than we realise. As a parent of toddlers I'm a bit worried about what the future will hold for them.

I think this is also applicable to adults, although it’s effects could be less since smartphones weren’t prevalent when current adults were children.

I am sorry, that's an absolutely naive way to look at it. The fact is that it is being increasingly recognized that current Social Media networks are a stress inducers in kids and thus causing mental health issues in them. It is in fact not a great medium to communicate with someone too - if any kid prefers to talk to a friend through social media, than in person, it indicates social anxiety issues that need to be addressed, as otherwise the dependence on SM will actually aggravate the symptom. Not to mention parents should be teaching their kids not to share personal and private feelings on SM with questionable privacy policies (and lack of laws) that will one day be used against them publicly, directly or indirectly.

> School, practice, volunteer, homework, bed, do it all again. This builds up to a very difficult to unwind ball of stress, anger, fear and despair.

Sounds like all our childhood (with slight variations) before social media. Now add social media to this mix as one of the daily rituals / chores and you will begin to partly see how it can add to the stress in teens.

Everything you’ve mentioned is highly limited to the US.

Asian countries, for example, have been reducing pressure on kids in terms of schooling and exams over the past decade or so.

People whose livelihood depends on social media don't want the culpability of their company's work. C'est le monde.

It is shocking ly addictive without any real benefit.

Watching funny or weird stuff for 2h or seeing opinions from some weird people did not add anything to my life

I deleted the app to get out of it.

The zero tolerance you mention refers to the punishment of a particular situation not that the school doesn't tolerate anything. It's not a contradiction just another use of the word

As for diversity is good but blank, what blank?

They compare notes on Facebook and realize that everything is pretty shitty. They see the memes put together by people who have and have not done the research that decry the condition of the environment, the condition of employment, the condition of their fellow man. And honestly, a lot of the negativity is simply true.

There's a huge risk that we confuse the medium for the message... If people who watch television at the same rate that young people consume social media are more optimistic, it may not be because things aren't actually so bad... It may merely be that bad news drives away television advertising dollars and viewers.

And not to inject too much of my own pessimism, but I'm not sure a governing body whose membership has a mean age of 64 (!) Is constitutionally ready to wrestle with the notion that long after they're dead, the legacy they will have left the younger generation is a very depressing one.

I think I would always have had an issue, but I can quite directly point to the pressure cooker environment of getting into University. It is "not enough" simply to be good academically (which I was), you also needed to be a well rounded person, so you better use all your spare time doing activities to signal your well-roundedness!

I don't feel I was explicitly trying to do this, but I also, being 17, didn't really say no - I mean how do you say no to a bunch of career advisors telling you "you have a chance to go to the top university!!!" etc.

In such an environment, there's little respite, because there's always some kids telling you what they are doing.

I don't think social media in and of itself is to blame, but what it does, in concert with phones, is remove any and all "downtime" from this messaging. There's an encouraged perfectionism, so young people are bombarded with images of how _great_ everyone else's life is. Not only are kids pushy/perfect in the canteen, but now they're pushy/perfect at 10pm on your mobile too.

I struggled very badly with this at university. By that time I was a guy with panic attacks trying to keep up with a course, and I wanted to do all the normal stuff too like party. Of course since I _couldn't_ always do this it ended up being interpreted by most people as "let's not invite him". Social media wasn't directly responsible for this situation, but it is definitely a negative contributing factor. When you're far from home doom-scrolling facebook and all the stuff you missed that you're being left out of, this is really not helpful.

So what I think is that social media will reinforce people who are naturally self-confident, but it will not help people who have issues. I suspect every experience is slightly different, but the inability to escape constant reminders of your own inadequacy, if interpreted that way, is a problem.

Or if I can sum it up, it is simply the same old social/peer pressure, extended to 24/7.

What helps a lot is a moderating influence, a reminder that it is OK to be just normal.

I am also very, very glad I grew up when I did. All my early teenage years were free of any of this - we had MSN and texting and all the usual teenage angst, but you never had mobile doom-scrolling late at night - at best, you could text until you ran out of credit. I feel sorry for young girls particularly growing up with Instagram.

However, I agree that social media is just one factor. Pushy parenting, or pushy schooling, is also a huge risk, as are all the traditional risks like teenagers being horrible bullies to each other.

Addendum: the net impact of pushing me to go to a top university so hard was that I did not go to a top university, and dropped out of a pretty good university officially at the end of the first year, but unofficially I was "done" 6 months in anyway. Absolutely none of this career advice and "enrichment" activity helped me achieve any kind of potential, it just made me miserable and blow up with the stress of it.

It is a myth that kids have to do all of these things. Sports should be extracurricular activity, i.e. outside education. You don't need to do sports to be healthy or to learn about team work.

And volunteering? Volunteering is called community service if you're a criminal. Why punish kids like that? They will soon have to be grown ups, let them have some years to remember positively.

2. applies to adults too, and has always been true.

3. has always been true.

Social media maybe somewhere frustrated kids go, but it is also a place where the shit starts or festers.

If you think it's a fault of the society and parenting, hey everyone, stop making your kids suffer.

Work ethic doesn't come with being overworked as a kid, work ethic is something you can rationally explain as being beneficial for the individual and the group, and I would dare say that work ethic is strongly correlated with physical health.

You have to remember that the teens going on social media now are meeting a cesspool of nonsense that has been there for over a decade. The cesspool was long in the making before they showed up, and by older individuals, themselves arguably a product of our messed up society.

Capitalism, marketing, fanning the flames of consumerism, maximising profitability — these things feed down into society and create bad parenting habits and bad habits in individual measures of self esteem as well.

I happened to look at Instagram the other day someone was showing me their account on their phone, and the sheer amount of commercialisation was horrifying to behold. People of all ages will eventually be quite unable to determine art from advertisement, because they will have been bombarded with so much kitsch advertising that they'll equate the two.

People are more or less just turning themselves into adverts as well. And those that pay attention to it feed into a sort of tribalism. Each brand forms a tribe of supporters. I've noticed this with fashion, food, music, and more.

And if people are being pushed into social media, it still occurs to me that social media is pretty much the last place I would want kids to end up. People are impressionable and naive, and for them to end up somewhere where blatant falsities and conspiracies are viral just can't be good.

I'm not suggesting free speech be stopped, but the problem is that journalism used to be profitable because it was a source of truth or at the very least a source of feasible opinions.

But it has turned out to be more profitable to instead churn out bullshit, and profitability is all anyone cares about.

And this is to say nothing of the implications of having all this data about people and what they do, flying around between tech-marketing giants that could probably afford to buy countries if there were an appropriate mechanism...

Social media is nothing but bad news. It's not confined to kids either, you may have noticed my use of the word "people" not "kids". Many adults are just as impressionable and easily taken in by the same bullshit. They're just as glued to their mobile devices. They're just as dysfunctional. And they will go on to raise kids.

Dysfunctional parents raising kids in a dysfunctional society results in what? Probably dysfunctional kids.

Some will prove resistant and able to carve themselves their own identity and think critically in the face of it all, but they will probably be vilified or at least ignored or considered crazy.

One. They lived through one major recession, and here it wasn't really major, and is not something they lived through recently. They were younger than 6 when it started. I've lived through two. The 80s weren't a happy time, and there are no signs that that had such an impact on teen mental health. If it did, it would be proof that the impact of a major recession is temporary.

> prospect of a mountain of debt right after graduation

Situation wrt to teen mental health is similar in Europe, but there's a much smaller graduation debt.

Don't try to downplay the role of internet, mobile devices and social media. Here's a thought for your correlationism:

> Teens are aware that they are going to inherit a pretty terrible world, and are powerless to do anything about it.

Perhaps it's social media that makes that they are either too aware of it or simply mention it more often.

The study in question debates young teens, ages 11-13 and 13-15, well before college.

In my experience as a parent of young teens, while they're sensitive to climate issues and of course "suffered" [1] during the pandemic, they aren't politicized, don't care about house prices, and don't know what "inflation" even means.

What they do know is what TikTok is, and what it means to be excluded from a Whatsapp group, and to spend hours each day wondering how they should reply to a perceived slight on some Discord channel.

I successfully forbid FB, Instagram, Snapchat (I don't use them myself, at all) but can't really outlaw Whatsapp because all communications go through it.

It's an uphill battle but as a parent I'm extremely resentful to FAANG to put us all through this.

[1] I put this in quotes because my kids quite liked the lockdown; they didn't have to go to school and could play in the yard all day. (Of course their experience would have been different if we lived in a city with no yard.)

- - -

Edit: Many angry replies; it seems my original post failed to make its point clearly. Let's try again.

I was replying to a comment that said, in essence, that environmental factors (the economy, politics, climate change) were probably more to blame than social media as an explanation for teens' mental health.

As a parent of young teens, I disagree on that specific argument. I think social media is much more to blame than anything else, for harming teens' mental health.

But in no way do I dismiss the existence of said environmental factors, or their effects on the well-being of people, in actual terms as well as in consequences on our anxiety levels.

30 March 1973

Dear Mr. Nadeau:

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society—things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

Sincerely, E. B. White

[0] https://lettersofnote.com/2012/01/06/wind-the-clock-for-tomo...

Doctors don’t generally say to patients “yes, your life really is terrible and you are right to be anxious and/or depressed”. The nature of the illness lies in our response to the reality of the world.

In my view you could come up with a list of bad things similar to yours for any age in history. This is not a uniquely bad time to be alive. (I’d argue there has never been a better time, but that’s a separate matter). What seems to have changed is our coping mechanisms.

Yet, he and many others lived.

I'm not trying to downplay the problems of today's youth (I'm not even 30 myself and will have to deal with lots of them by myself). But I think humanity has proven that it will find its way.

One might argue that social media makes that easier. After all it is far easier to connect with your loved ones in a matter of a click now but here is the key. I don’t think virtual engagements can ever compare to or replace the activation of neural pathways that happens from physical presence.

I think there's an incredible resillience especially in youth to not get bogged down in or at least to tangle with & find peace with the sad scary backdrop of the world. When they have elememts of hope, when they have positive role models, when they see successful adults having ok lives. And frankly that's a challenge, period; there's just little community, few role models left. Big employers are better quality of life but it's deeply depersonalizing, being so deeply embedded somewhere odd deep deep inside an org chart, with only modest chances of getting to work hard for a long time & then at best retire. The new work world is opaque, dis-real.

Reality is already very well built, well estaished, and there's little available space or reward for trying stuff out & finding ourselves. We see less making life happen.

A lot of this difficulty is because of so many of these sad scary hopeless background factors. But rather than try to tackle endless symptoms as problems, i keep feeling like there's rootstriking we could be doing by trying to develop & support a more youthfully active world, by directly trying to support & enable people interested in taking chances in getting things started. In building the world. Not just working in it. Some real signs of positive life, creating role models of people who have real hands in shapimg their lives, have established good locus of controls: this is just wild spouting hypothesis, but I think that would make such a difference. Some signs of reality within reach.

With respect, I truly mean no insult when I say this is a naive and ignorant position.

By every measure, the world is generally better than it has ever been. Far better than any decade in the past you could care to name. Despite media doom-and-glooming, there is every reason to expect that teens will inherit an overall materially better world than their parents, local minima notwithstanding.


Haidt brings up those points in the testimony to rule out other factors and prove that social media is specifically to blame.

However, teenagers had a terrible, rotten time during WWII - bombs on cites, constant threat of military service, parents and elder brothers killed in war, one's country being invaded, etc. yet on the whole most never suffered these mental health issues. The difference is striking

Somehow, they had stamina and resilience that today's teenagers don't have. Many of today's problems I believe go back to over-protection and mollycoddling of kids when they are very young. In the War years a kid was an independent agent by the time he or she was six.

Ukraine was that for me. Put me in a huge helpless funk and I could not stop reading or thinking about it. Then I realized I had to stop checking in everyday. It may sound heartless, and of course I am still aware that the war is still going on and people are still dying, but I really believe focusing on things I can actually control in my life is one what to feel empowered and to improve my mood. Focusing on all of the various global tragedies that I can do nothing about is the fast track to depression.

Average debt upon graduation is approx. $31K, less than the cost of a mid-grade car.

I would not call that 'a mountain', and unlike a car which will rapidly depreciate in a very short amount of time, getting a decent college degree will pay dividends throughout your life in increased earnings power.

According to govt estimates, the average lifetime earnings difference between someone with just a high-school diploma, and someone with a college degree is - on average $550,000.

A $550,000 improvement in lifetime earnings in exchange for $31K in debt, seems like one of the best investments you can make.

But I also know social media is not representative of the population. Maybe 1-2% of people make up 90%+ of the content.

It’s also a place where lonely and depressed people can go and feel heard and commiserate.

Teenagers don’t have the life experience to know that and have their own life direction and purpose to keep them occupied.

Teenage years are a struggle for everyone, so I can only imagine how hard they must be when a social media echo chamber reinforces the futility of it all.

So much of what we fill kids' heads with today is crap. There's no reason to be freaking out about the climate. Politics have always been divisive and "extreme" but there's a lot of examples of way more chaotic things in the not so distant past. Europe was in non-stop war with each other for hundreds of years until 1945 for example. The USA is no where near a civil war.

They are inheriting a great world but an imperfect world. Every generation has. Every generation has had problems to solve.

People with attitudes like yours who are misanthropic and depressed and may need help that are the problem. If you're miserable, find a way not to be. Stop trying to share it with everyone else.

Completely agree. Also, there's the fact that we tell children to "act like adults", like it meant being civilized, educated, and kind to each other; but it's not hard to see that some significant segment of adults are rage-spouting, ear-covering person-children when it comes to discourse.

Maybe we need to train ourselves and the next generation on how maintain civility in engagement-driven platforms that reward incendiary interactions.

That may be the best long-term solution... but I'm not sure what can be done when some people with opposing views can't argue in good faith right now.

When you're 14, World War I begins and ends when you're 18 with 22 million dead.

Soon after a global pandemic, the Spanish Flu, appears, killing 50 million people. And you're alive and 20 years old.

When you're 29 you survive the global economic crisis that started with the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange, causing inflation, unemployment and famine.

When you're 33 years old the nazis come to power.

When you're 39, World War II begins and ends when you're 45 years old with a 60 million dead. In the Holocaust 6 million Jews die.

When you're 52, the Korean War begins. When you're 64, the Vietnam War begins and ends when you're 75.

A child born in 1985 thinks his grandparents have no idea how difficult life is, but they have survived several wars and catastrophes.

--Quoted from somewhere

As a side note, your list seems highly exaggerated. I understand climate change is serious, but where is anyone saying it will be unlivable within decades?

It’s a fallacy to think that we’re living in “extraordinary” times relative to the past.

Wars, pandemics, economic cycles, political instability, etc are not new phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination.

For teenagers in the 60s it was perfectly plausible that their entire school, neighborhood, town, city could be engulfed in a mushroom cloud at any moment, for example.

In fact, the whole housing problem can be described as forcing a high standard of living upon people through zoning (single family buildings only for example) and it often is against the will of newcomers. The standard of living may be considered desirable but it may not be sustainable for everyone.

The same applies to college. It is better if you go, but it shouldn't hurt if you don't. Somehow it hurts a lot and you are worse off than before even though your actual productivity is the same.

I don't know. Maybe we should call it the productivity paradox (the Solow paradox is poorly named because it isn't even a paradox), because the problem here is that an increase in productivity does not necessarily lead to more wealth for everyone, in fact, it can actually lead to concentration of wealth and therefore be a net reduction of wealth for a big portion of the population.

One of the reasons why the "economy must grow" (every year) is that we concentrate all the unemployment at the bottom of society and all the jobs at the top of society, leading to inequality and eventually unrest. If this misallocation were to be stopped then the productivity paradox would be resolved.

Terrible compared to what? Rebuilding after a world war? Subsistence farming? How did those previous generations manage to maintain their mental health? The difference is that these days people spend their time looking at lies on social media, then measure the world's shortcomings in comparison to those lies.

I don't mean to come across as snarky, but there is a lot to unpack in this statement. First, you inherit something that your parents or guardians own, and the world is definitely not owned by them. Second, why feel powerless if they are actually going to inherit something? They can always fix it after they take control. Again, I am not being mean, but just showing how you can think of this from a different angle.

Now let's circle back to the issue of social media. Kids who are tuned in to social media are going to constantly hear exaggerated claims of gloom and doom, and that would numb their senses. This prevents them from focusing on the present and all the things that you build for yourself are in the present.

The point is -- no matter how you frame it, the information overload is taking its toll on everybody who is exposed, not just teens.

Maybe this is the actual problem. Teens are being told the world is terrible by pessimists when there truly hasn’t been a better time to be alive.

The world is amazing and beautiful. Of course there are atrocities, there always are, but the developed world is living a pretty amazing life. Even the poor relatively speaking.

Teens only thing they are going to inherit a terrible world because adults (and media) tell them the world is terrible. Stop the nonsense negativity and give the youth confidence to solve some of the harder problems humans face.

If someone lives a sad life and projects that on to the youth then that person is the problem. Kids are incredibly impressionable and impressing them with your knowledge about atrocities in the world does no good for their psychie

And we were just warming up. After that it turns out that the war to end all wars was just the pregame show. An eccentric vegetarian artist with a knack for riling up crowds decided to declare a literal genocidal war on the world, and for some time it looked very much like he was going to win. It only ended after another 80 million deaths (about 3% of the world population this time), the deployment of nuclear weapons, and countless war crimes.

And then? Decades of people got to live in the great times where every day there was a real and legitimate concern of imminent nuclear war (which did nearly blast off multiple times) to the point that nuclear drills were a part of the classroom, and people building their own nuclear doomsday bunkers was not only not eccentric but just plain ole pragmatism.

The point of this is not just to emphasize that the past was unimaginably and exponentially worse than the present in every imaginable way, but rather that there was no widespread mental health collapse. And there was no "shielding" kids from anything, when the world was literally burning in front of their eyes. So clearly something has changed, and it's not just that things have just gotten bad or that people are now uniquely aware of that. I have my own hypothesis, but this post is already too long. I'll conclude with a song which this post reminded me of:

Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g

Lyrics: https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Billy-Joel/We-Didn-t-Start...

Meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Didn%27t_Start_the_Fire#His...

It almost feels like people are completely unaware of various pandemics that wiped out millions, trial by fire and witch hunts and so on. Better yet, the economy has never been better compared to many previous years in the last century and more.

The only major difference has been the advent of social media.

It reminds me of that Marilyn Manson quote;

>Michael Moore : If you were to talk directly to the kids at Columbine or the people in that community, what would you say to them if they were here right now?

>Marilyn Manson : I wouldn't say a single word to them. I would listen to what they have to say, and that's what no one did.

The same adults that resonated with, once again grow up and don't listen to the kids

The reason you think of the terrible place is because you've been brainwashed to think so. Social media and the news constantly tells you only bad things.

But if you actually step outside, you'll realize the world is an amazing place.

You are judged before you meet someone by your social media page. You can't know everything about a person before meeting them, or really without being a good friend of theirs, so social media becomes a proxy for this, and not a particularly good one because you put what you want on it and thus teenagers try to game it in various ways (for example only posting holiday pics to show how glamorous your life is).

It becomes a race towards the bottom in so many ways and in particular for girls, because so much value is placed on physical appearance (either by others or by the girls themselves) and how 'cool' are you and thus it makes you constantly compare and judge yourself with others. It is no surprise that teenage mental health is plummeting when a lot of time is spent on social media, it constitutes a large part of the status game, and there is no reasonable alternative. This is why I think it's a sole factor because I can imagine you would have the same problem even if you took away other economic/political/environmental problems.

Not to say those also don't have an effect, because they obviously do, but unlike those other things, every teenager wants friends, everyone wants a social life, it's not something only half of them know and the other half don't know much about because they read it on the news or learnt about it from school, it's something that affects every single one of them every single day. You cannot escape from it.

Surprisingly despite being a guy I don't know many guys with mental health issues, maybe they don't want to talk about it to other guys, maybe I am not close enough with them, but most girls I know do have mental health issues, and every single one of them (n~=50), literally without exception, has self esteem and body image issues. And it worries me, a lot, because how can we have it that 50% of the population suffers like this every day for years on end and nothing changes? What will the end result be?

Terrible world? Are you kidding me? Try being born literally anywhere else at literally any other time in the world. The rest of the world isn't fucking Sweden.

Count your blessings. There are literally billions who would give up their first born for the "terrible world" you just described. Kids in the congo aren't having meltdowns pretending they have tourettes like spoiled American kids of the self-esteem experiment.

- The climate won't be un-livable in a few decades.

- Major recessions did impact work prospects but people in developed nations still had food on the table. Nothing too terrible. You can thank government intervention (see below) for fiddling with the market.

- The pandemic was concerning only because of government propaganda and because of how governments treated it (see below).

- Nobody force kids to graduate with debt.

- Political extremism is again a function of propaganda.

In general for any government related problem there is a solution - moving abroad and going where you're treated best.

There will always be countries in a different stage where things are cheaper and easier to fix compared to the Western world - and on that I agree with you, current governments and politicians make it impossible to fix the situation and we're doomed to increase spending and inequality until society collapse.

Sure, there are problems, but nothing you can escape from.

The main concern for the future I have is if China - or their socialist ideology which is seeping in the west at an alarming rate - end up owning the world and turn everyone into slaves of the Galactic Empire.

Social media blows up the fear about climate change (it definitely will not be "unlivable") and political extremisism.

Being misinformed about things you can do nothing to change isn't good for mental health, regardless of your age, and that's exactly what social media does.

It's not just about the content of social media. This is the tobacco moment for tech in general.

When your entire world becomes a 6 inch view-port that you're inseparable from it's tantamount to a kind of mental and physical servitude. Electronically tagged convicted criminals suffer less. Physiological harm to eyes, neck, and posture from hunching over, is visible in young people in their 20s. Diminished attention span and poor interpersonal skills is absolutely obvious now. I am seeing devastating mental health issues in the children of friends, kids who have everything to live for and love life, are isolated, glum, and neurotic.

When I started researching Digital Vegan [1], late in the game after 2018, my main focus was privacy and the effects of surveillance on adults. In many ways I wanted to assure myself that I was not a total crank who was growing old prematurely and shouting at clouds.

As I read more into this area [2] I went through feelings most of us will remember from the start of the pandemic... as anecdotal snippets started to form into coherent narratives and hard evidence, and finally the sinking unavoidable realisation that something BIG is happening. Surveillance capitalism is just one symptom.

The rapid growth of decent science around these issues has been dizzying.

From Haigt; "I believe I can be most helpful to this committee by first summarizing the academic literature on the changes that have occurred in teen mental health since 2012"

This is key! Most of us are entrenched in to-and-fro arguments about what we think are mere opinions and anecdotes. Things have moved past that.

As technologists, instead of defending an illusion we identify with like the guys from Exxon who just got news of the first climate report in the 1960s, let's start talking in good faith about how we can fix things - through sustainable, durable open hardware, software freedom, civic cybersecurity and protections from government and corporations, reducing use, educating young people away from social media and towards a healthy, limited use of tech.

[1] https://digitalvegan.net

[2] https://ledger.humanetech.com/

You yourself show a big problem with social media: feelings and takes which are not based in reality at all. Of course if you think the world is TERRIBLE and in EVERYTHING is FALLING APART you're not going to have a good time, regardless of whether that's actually the case or not.

Physical drugs are relatively easy to not get into because for the most part, the majority of society doesn't use them and their users are still mostly marginalized. If your current social group are drug addicts it's possible to find a new, healthier group.

Digital drugs on the other hand are something that nearly everyone uses and thus you have to use them if you want to effectively fit in and participate in society. Not consuming these drugs just makes you an outcast especially in a ruthless environment such as school.

The solution is regulation to make digital-drug-dealing illegal. Kill this whole "attention economy" with fire and make such a disgusting business model impossible to operate and the problem will self-resolve.

And the driver's do too! It's insane. I live in a moderately-sized city (~1m people) and I've learned to keep my phone in my pocket or not bring it at all, and to definitely take out headphones when I cross the street. I've still been almost hit, many many times, and I'm not even jaywalking. I literally wait for the white walking person to show before I step off the curb.

this is very bad, the problem is not tiktok, she finds an escape thanks to tiktok, don't remove that from her

talk to her, talk to her teacher if she doesn't have problems at school with other kids

> Our kids are being milked of their time, attention, imagination, focus and money. The majority of them can't even cross the streets properly any more. They don't even look if the drivers saw them, they all have a phone in hand.

that's an education problem, it is your fault, not theirs or some apps

High school was hard enough for me when the web was just barely coming out of its primordial state of "some nerdy stuff for dweebs".

I also can't imagine the magnitude and speed of social and interpersonal relationships that happens as a result of social media and just instant communication. Trying to navigate that as a teen is just something I can't comprehend, before one learns how to truly be equanimous as an adult who has a separate identity from how they are perceived by others.

Maybe it's for the best.

My parents used to say 'if all your friends jumped off a bridge...', and I hated it, so I haven't used that one yet. I'm trying to rely on actual merits instead of follower cliches.

...I liked the 90s a lot better, other than gizmos and means for distraction I can't really imagine why someone would prefer the 2020s.

Sure, they are not scrounging for food nor is there widespread famine but politics is increasingly polarised. There is a climate problem looming and the youngest will deal with it, western citizens or otherwise.

Economies are tanking, job markets are topsy turvy not to mention the real estate problem in a lot of western countries.

These problems, while not as dire as the problems faced by those in the developing world, are still problems. You cannot hand-wave this away by comparing one's lot in life to that of a person with no limbs. That is unfairly reductive.

The challenge, as you point out, is how to deal with this information and that is where i feel modern society has failed.

A lot of people were saying exactly this right before Franz Ferdinand got shot.

It's a muscle. Anyone who hasn't done school for a while will have to rebuild that muscle. It was like that before social media, just gotta relearn how to learn.

Programming is similar. If you do nothing but CRUD for a while (for whatever reason), when you gotta do the hard stuff where you have to keep a bunch of structure in your head at the same time, you're probably gonna struggle with it. After a few weeks, you'll be in better shape.

Same with reading complex documents, writing, math, etc.

My main app of choice is YouTube and it's just astonishing how much amazing educational content there is on the app.

MIT OpenCourseware, 3Blue1Brown, PBS Eons, SmarterEveryDay, ... and I could go on and on....

DESPITE THIS, their recommendations and the YouTube search has gotten so unbelievably terrible over the past few years that it's just becoming unusable.

Their recommendations have nothing to do with the channels I'm subscribed to, instead it's so much goddamn crap with click-bait titles/thumbnails (because one of the biggest factors for the YouTube Rec. Algorithm is thumbnail click-through-rate).

For YouTube search, if you search for "schlieffen plan", then sure the first 3-4 recommendations will be based on what you searched. BUT after that, the fucking recommendations have nothing to do with your search query... instead it'll just be completely random stuff that the YouTube algorithm thinks you might click on.

It's gotten completely unusable with YouTube shorts now because they're trying to shove that shit down the throat of their users (99% of the YouTube shorts are complete fucking garbage).

It's really a shame because there's so much amazing content that's been uploaded to the YouTube platform, but the idiots in charge of the company are completely ruining the app... especially over the past few years.

100% of your online identity was under your control in my day. You were exactly who you chose to be. Not anymore. Now if you're ugly, fat, gay, a minority in real life you're the same online. The internet is not an escape anymore. That's why it's making more kids kill themselves now than it was twenty years ago.

This is such a strange thing to me. I understand that kids want to fit in, but really are parents supposed to always make sure they fit in even when trends are actively harmful? Kids haven't always even had so many peers-- 300 years ago you'd spend most of your time with relatives much older than you learning life skills. Was that really so terrible for them? If kids must fit in, then parents are basically screwed because many children and adults overuse social media. I just find it so strange that limiting kids activities is just seen as not worth even trying.

I am a huge fan of Jonathan Haidt, and think he's done a great job in explaining some of the cultural shifts going on, and the changing of morality/psychology in our society.

But I feel like he is overselling social media's impact. He even mentions in his testimony, that the correlation between social media use and mental illness may be around r=0.10 . That is a fairly weak correlation. I also have not seen a study (note that this doesn't mean one doesn't exist) that has done a good job of controlling for the selection effects involved with the data, to attempt to understand if there is any causality involved and what direction it would go. My hypothesis is that those with mental illness would be more likely to use social media more in the first place.

Social media feels like a bit of a bogeyman in our society. There are 100% issues with it, and I don't necessarily think it's net-positive for humanity, but it's only one part of the ever-changing environment we as humans are now finding ourselves in. Blaming social media won't solve our issues, I feel like they run much deeper. Some of the deeper issues are around meaning, identity, belonging, status, decreasing tolerance for discomfort/inconvenience, increasing detachment from physical reality, etc. Our amorphous culture is guiding us down this path and it's really hard for us to grasp...

I don’t have a study for this but I don’t believe this. More likely than now you have to be consuming such content to get such content. If you go to TikTok for positive vibes and actively search it out , that’s what you will get.

I worry a lot about my kids getting sucked into that world. Right now we're keeping them well away from social media, and very little and restricted screen time.

Your comment gives me confidence that this is the right approach, but I'm not sure yet how to navigate it as they enter their teenage years and all their friends have phones.

We are leaning them into non-digital pastimes and IRL relationships, which they fortunately enjoy. I hope this momentum can carry them through what I see as the danger years of teenage and early adulthood.

And in school kids "using their phones" for work in class, but really, just using their phones. So I can't even lock it down during class time. Sigh.

Luckily the second child (pre-teen boy) shows no interest in phones or social media. Just video games. All. Day. Long.

Life is boring as fuck. It really is. It takes a lot to keep a human captivated.

Yikes. How is a lack of positive vision indicative of poor social skills? You can be quite articulate and good at socializing but still suicidal.

Have you ever considered that maybe young people are disillusioned with their surroundings and the people who are older than them? After all - you come on here and complain that they’re socially inept, negative, and mostly unworthy of any attention. Maybe they’re just reflecting back what you feel about them.

There could be a post about some crazy new performance optimization coming to firefox and the top comment will be a link to a 15 year old bug where the right click menu padding for the flags page isn't consistent when viewed on BSD. Concluding the browser is abandonware due to this.

I definitely have been limiting my intake of news over the past several years. Election cycles are the worst for doom and gloom, but they all sell it, all the time.

Not relationships, marriage, work, or community. Even business is rarely zero sum, or the economy wouldn't grow. Generally speaking, business is win-win deals.

Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.

Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.

Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.

(from Naval)

All of the data I've seen on the mental health crisis in the West seems to indicate that it hits women harder than men. I have yet to see an explanation for why, though.

Does anyone know of any articles that thoroughly cover this gender split in mental health and why this particular issue is more predominantly affecting women?

Edited to add: the note under graph says "These mental illness estimates are based on a predictive model and are not direct measures of diagnostic status."

I think people have a right to know the world’s ugly, harsh facts and crazy opinions. Not knowing something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

I think the solution is to remind them of all the good facts and reasonable opinions. Warn about particularly bad stuff like gore (and do block this content from children until they reach young adulthood). And most importantly, teach them how to better manage their thoughts and emotions (techniques from therapy), so they can learn about bad stuff without being hurt or biased from it.

Then again, this take is from my own ignorance and personality. Maybe I haven’t been exposed to the real ugly stuff, or maybe I’m better at not reacting to stuff emotionally than others. But the main issue with restricting harsh information is, not knowing something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

No. Parenting and schools have gone completely to hell. You're not wrong, everyone else is. I still can't believe schools started letting kids carry their cell phones with them to class all day. As early as elementary school. WTF.

For my part, I figure my kids can have an unrestricted cell phone (and so, unrestricted Internet) as soon as they can pay for the device and plan on their own. If they can hold down a job to cover the bill, they can probably handle it. Fuck giving 8-year-olds personal smartphones. Or even 12-year-olds. That's insane.

Only if you discount the rest of the sentence you quoted...

> ... although I have not yet found good data from those regions.

I hate to be the one but what's your sample count? What does, "I actually work with students on a daily basis" mean? Are you a teacher in a high school? University? Do they intern/co-op at your company?

I attend a few schools for part-time things here and there, and I'm exposed to students aged 14-70 regularly. Politics are involved as a means of an identity, even if they realize that they are powerless to do anything.

The lack of critical thinking for any given saucy subject (most recently see Roe vs Wade) means that the opinions people hold are generally prepackaged from whatever sources they obtained them from and are internally congruent† - they know things here and there about a given subject, but externally nonsensical given the situation that the person is in and what they ought to focus their attention/time towards - they are, for lack of a better term, wasting their precious time away getting baited by professional media con people with attention grabbing headlines and memes.

† Best seen in person as a dialogue between two or more people where you're aware that their source material was written by one person in an essay (or a tweet roll) form, but has been changed to be a kind of a ping-ponged conversation where each person takes a turn to continue the over all narrative. (Better put: one big agreeable circle-jerk.)

They do cite a number of randomized controlled trials that show it's social media: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w-HOfseF2wF9YIpXwUUtP65-...

> Or is it also the knowledge that they effectively have no future. Rent is going up and mortgage rates are going up faster. A shrinking portion of young adults can now afford housing. The economy is becoming so disfunctional there's almost no reason to bother participating. When children end up in that position their family will turn on them and they have nothing materially or socially.

As a side note, "problems occurring" do not mean "they effectively have no future".

Speaking as still a young person, these are problems the last generation has left us. But they're their problems; hold overs from the generations best known for their blood lead levels. We'll fix them and, with any luck, we'll be better ancestors to our children. I'd rather you not throw us over the boat yet.

This sounds exactly like you are reading too much social media.

The people for which success is out of reach do not browse HN.

I never understood the food photos. Do I just not love food enough? Do people really enjoy seeing photos of their friends’ meals?

It's like telling society at large "diet and exercise" to lose weight, but when so many places are incredibly un-walkable, and food scientists produce foods engineered to make you want more. Yes, "diet and exercise" does make sense individually, but obviously that strategy has failed miserably for society at large given we are fatter than ever.