People jump on the bandwagon of “social media and smartphones are the problem”. Most people are sockpuppets, and just repeat this without thought.
If you mean indirectly, then maybe.
I think the problem is late stage capitalism, the increase in exploitation and cheating just to get money, and the real and encroaching fear of fascism or fascism-lite.
Inflation is increasing. Cost of living, housing, food and essentials are rising. Overtime culture is on the rise. Why would I be happy when the outlook for most of us is shit? I have to work long hours just to survive and there’s no escape. Buy a house, go into debt for 30 years with the knowledge that the bank is getting massive amounts of free money in the form of interest, and they provide no service other than allowing you to pay an overpriced principal over thirty fucking years.
Work until I’m 67? What’s the point? It’s time to die at that point as ill be too old and who gives a shit anyway. I’m supposed to be appreciative of my 3 weeks PTO per year, that’s when I can go have fun and enjoy life, after that back to working unpaid overtime for a billionaire investor or CEO or whatever.
Maybe social media and smartphones are helping the young see how shit and hopeless our society is. Unless you can figure out how to be a celebrity, or an investor, or a landlord/landowner, you’re stuck working a shit job until you’re old and life is gone. Why the shit fuck would people be happy and want to have kids?
And you didn’t even mention climate change.
I’m in my early 30s, so I experienced cooler summers, but also the crises in 2007 and the following years (where basically every Eurozone country south of the Alps almost collapsed).
I also experienced the refugee “crisis” in Germany and obviously covid.
What I learned is, that the only thing our governments can do is throwing money at rich people. Literally nothing else. Every single crisis, conflict, bad situation was met with utter incompetence, corruption, and often enough some new way to blame poor people.
I can’t speak for other countries, but ask yourself, what actually changed for the better in the last 20 years thanks to any government action? Rents? Still high. Education? Educate yourself. Healthcare? Here’s aspirin, good luck.
The young people of today see that our entire society is moving in an extremely dangerous direction of collapse, and they feel like they can do nothing against it. They feel powerless against a system that ostensibly is super open and democratic. That’s why so many (not only young people) are voting for extremists. They want to see everything burn.
My gay uncle can get married now, should he so choose. Thats pretty neat.
Your gay uncle can get married for now. That’s still potentially on the chopping block with the current Supreme Court.
I agree with this. Kids, at least middle school to high school, are smarter about this stuff than people give them credit for. I believe this is just kids being given the chance to see how bleak the outlook is for them when before they were not allowed to interact with that part of the world, and when they were, things were better than they are now.
Did things suddenly become worse for those types of things around 2014? If that was the cause, I feel like you’d see a bump up in 2008 with the great recession.
When quality of life is decreasing for the average person and there is no light at the end of the tunnel, people get depressed. Hypercompetitive society and an ever widening wealth gap does not help.
Notice how the right wing people saying the lockdowns caused this are wrong. The lockdowns certainly didn’t help, but this problem has been brewing for far longer.
Yeah, this is probably a chart showing social isolation and living online. Of course that would increase during lockdowns too, but the trend was already there.
Pretty sure you’re just naming another symptom that is correlated but not the cause of the depression. Likely the cause of the depression and the isolation is the destruction of third places and the opportunity for unsupervised and unstructured play. Kids spend all their time online because there’s nothing else for them to do. There’s nowhere to play outside, and even if there is, they’re not allowed to go there without adults micromanaging them.
If adults don’t think working harder will make your life better, what hope do these kids have?
Working harder to make billionaires richer as the only option is fucking depression inducing.
Came to make a smartass comment like “at least they’ll grow out of it when they become adults, right???” but the more I stared at the chart and thought about what it was saying it started to hurt a bit.
I had a bad time largely growing up, and still to this day struggle a lot with depression. I’m front about the happiest time period on this chart.
I went and looked up the study, and there’s over 40 pages of charts similar to this one. All the things about depression seem up, and participation in school, activities, and dating/sex/drugs are all down considerably. It doesn’t sound like anything is better for kids.
I didn’t have children, mostly due to the bad time I had, so I’m curious to go back and read the study, though I didnt see any obvious conclusions skimming through. I feel my perception of if things are bad today is skewed due to my issues, so is the world really worse these days, or is something else going on?
There’s no hope anymore. Simple as that.
For a pretty long time, probably starting even before WW2 in some countries, there was this hope “tomorrow will be better, my children can have a better life”. And that hope was at least somewhat true.
But it’s gone now, and the children understand that. What is the positive narrative for a 16 year old child now? They know exactly that they’ll have a worse life than their parents in many regards.
this. I’m still grieving my lost childhood (extreme trauma) at the same time I’m grieving my lost future. i don’t understand the point of going on, but talk like that scares the ones i love. I’m not gonna do anything to myself, but I’m not that worried if something happens to me either…
