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.
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.
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.
The villages is actually pretty affordable. If you have a nice house, even in a low to medium cost of lviign area you can sell it and buy a place in the villages with the proceeds. It's not like south florida where everything is a million plus. The villages was specifically put inland and designed to be affordable for blue collar workers that have been working for 45 years. Excluding children allows the government to save a bunch of money on schooling and the like.
> 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.
I strongly disagree with this for children & community buildings. Children shouldn't be subject to congestion pricing. Teenagers should be free to rove a mall and be harmlessly loud and messy without being pressured to buy something-- chances are they will buy something eventually but it shouldn't be a requirement just to participate in community. I also wish my local makerspace didn't require a purchase. They should be funded by a government grant or wealthy donor such that impoverished people can learn skills and find community as equally as those with the spending money to chuck 5$ on a doodaad they'll never use.
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?
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.
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
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.
Jon Haidt is a conservative now?? good lord, if that is what you think you must be so far left that anybody to the right of Stalin is a Republican. Jon Haidt is about as even-tempered and desiring of reconciliation as anybody out there. We could all stand to be a little more like him.
Please, talk to the people in your lives about politics, or the polarization will only continue to intensify. Common ground is found through dialog, not through cutting everyone in your life out because they fall to one side or another of an arbitrary ideological goalpost that you've decided is the critical opinion everyone needs to agree with in order to be blessed with your presence.
I say this because Jon Haidt started this website, among other things:
Are these not literally a laundry list of conservative talking points? And, by the way, you can be conservative without being MAGA.
Love — “Monogamy is so outdated.”
Community — “I have enough friends online.”
Country — “I’m embarrassed to be an American.”
Work — “I’m quiet-quitting.”
Family — “I’m not bringing kids into this melting world.”
Faith — “My parents are such naive Bible thumpers. By the way, what’s your star sign?”
Quiet-quitting is a conservative value? I thought the conservative value was that hard work and having dedication to your employer is the way to get ahead in life. That's what conservatives have always told me.
And you certainly don't have to be a conservative to become dissatisfied with internet dating. It genuinely sucks for a lot of people who just want to find somebody who understands them. Getting your dick sucked is great but wanting something more than that doesn't intrinsically make you a conservative.
I think you're just seeing what you want to see. These are the kind of things anybody with liberal or progressive political opinions can find themselves feeling.
Did you read this backwards? These are examples given in the article of society’s alleged ills. Having the entire grab bag of them listed like this is undeniably conservative.
It's a list of things young people are dissatisfied with. They're dissatisfied with work and don't believe they can get ahead by working harder. They're dissatisfy with app dating and don't believe they can find lasting happiness with it. These are not conservative concerns; they're anybody concerns.
> Having [an] entire grab bag of [concerns] listed like this is undeniably conservative.
Ridiculous. Anybody who has multiple concerns in their life will have a list of concerns. Articulating this isn't a conservative trait, it's just basic self reflection. If you don't have a list of concerns with your own life then you're obviously doing very well. But just because you can't relate to people who's lives aren't as great as yours doesn't mean those people are conservative.
(You see I swapped out "the" with "an". Because that list is not The entire grab bag of characteristically conservative concerns. There's no mention of immigration, guns, abortion, voter IDs, crime rates, fear of carbon taxes and corporate regulations, drag-queen story hours, critical theory and progressive school teaches or really anything like any of that. It's clearly not "The" list of conservative concerns. You're characterizing it that way because that's what you want to see for some reason. Maybe you tripped over the mention of religion, but if you put stereotypes aside and look at public opinion polling, you will find that religion in America is largely bipartisan. Even the denominations that lean strongly one way still have millions of adherents who lean the other, e.g. 28% of evangelical protestants who lean Democrat. 55% of American Democrats report that their belief in God is absolutely certain and an additional 21% say their belief is fairly certain.)
I am certain the list of concerns in the article is not the entire grab bag of conservative concerns as you claimed. It's not even most of the bag, most of the things in that list don't even have a conservative tint. If I'm wrong, then point me to the worries about abortion or gun control in the article. If you can't do that, then what's your basis for saying this is the entire grab bag?
I don't think you can give me a substantive response to this, but give it a shot. You could at least try.
No, it's a list of things this young person is dissatisfied with about what their peers believe. And most of them are stereotypically conservative concerns.
You're the one lumping traditional conservative with MAGA types. And yes, many of these talking points are traditional conservative as is your appeal to "even tempered reconciliation" which is classic stop fighting and just accept my conservatism talk.
Jon Haidt is a conservative now??
<snip>
If Haidt and those like him are getting lumped in with the MAGA election-denying types, we're all screwed.
There's only one person that I see in this branch of comments trying to lump Haidt in with the MAGA-hat-wearers. One can be a conservative without a red hat. To put it another way, what, you're going to argue that Haidt is progressive? It doesn't take much of a glance at the URL you listed to determine that just isn't the case.
Every item on that list is popularized online and is definitely not uniform across the country.
I live in a low cost of living area, that's car dependent. Yes, houses are expensive because _everybody_ is moving to these areas and there's construction everywhere. House prices went up here because so many people started fleeing dense areas when remote opportunities became common. But even 2 miles from my current house you can get a big 3 bedroom apartment for about $900 / month in a good location. Get 2 roommates and your rent is $300 / month.
But the flip side of this should be cause and effect. If people are leaving other areas in higher numbers then there should be deals in those areas.
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.
The Supreme Court has generally allowed certain limited restrictions on media content targeted towards children. But an outright ban would probably run afoul of the First Amendment.
I expect the vagueness doctrine would also present an obstacle. How could legislators even define social media in a sufficiently precise way? Is email or group chat social media?
We already have an outright ban for children under 13 and that hasn't been shot down on First Amendment grounds. I don't see why that number couldn't be bumped to 18.
(Technically it's not a complete ban because it has an exception for parental permission, but it's a de facto ban because companies don't want to deal with it.)
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
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?
I'm not talking about my costs or the costs of an entry level developer. I can afford stupidly priced breakfast even if I don't want to spend that much.
I'm talking about waitresses, cashiers, shelf restockers, CNAs and whomever else on the bottom scale of pay not being able to afford anything but rent.
Come on. If you're drinking mimosas that's not a "medium range" breakfast. I don't know what kind of hipster cafe you're brunching at but you can eat a lot cheaper at Denny's or the local greasy spoon.
I still don't understand your complaint. There are many cheaper breakfast options available for price sensitive customers. The fact that some restaurants charge ridiculous prices to affluent consumers so that they can signal their social status doesn't tell us anything about economic prospects for youths.
Any kind of wine at breakfast has always been considered a luxury reserved for special occasions.
I dont' want to be judgemental about your choices. They are yours to make. But we can't really complain that life is unaffordable based on what sounds a luxury breakfast with a mimosa/champagne. I've never had a mimosa for breakfast in my life! The same breakfast at a highly-rated, non-chain, brunch place in my large US city would cost around $15+tip without the mimosa.
No person is entitled to have others serving them on the cheap; if we want servers and cooks to be well paid, then restaurant food will have to cost a pretty penny.
By the way, you can make the very same breakfast at home for less than $10/person, including the mimosa, and barely $5/person without it.
I'm 25. My friend group mostly consists of highly educated white collar workers. We can afford to do pretty much whatever we want other than quit our jobs. We still mostly spend our time doom scrolling. I think the "they can't afford to do anything else" argument misses how addictive social media is, especially when you grew up with it.
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.
I grew up around SF and was a free range teenager taking buses everywhere knowing the trunk lines across town would show up every 5 minutes, glad there were large shared spaces and affordable places to hang out and eat with friends.
Pieces from the New York Post would prolly make parents not want their kids to take MUNI regularly.
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.
>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?
Do places in the US and other countries with good public transit or are walkable like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, etc somehow not have any of the problems the article is referring to? I kind of doubt it
There's plenty wrong with how car dependent we are in most of the US but it's both not new to the latest generation and not uniform across the entire country yet there IS something that is uniform across the entire country AND new for this generation. Spoiler alert: it's not suburban sprawl.
For what it's worth, I'd love to know the answer to this. But I'm not as doubtful as you are, based on the (few) kids I know who do live in more walkable areas where they can see their friends in person without requiring an adult.
But your last paragraph seems to be once again missing the "takes as a given ... that the proximate cause of the issue is phone / social media centrism" part. Nobody in this thread has argued against that problem.
Well I don't know about that. I was very fortunate to be able to attend a residential college paid for through a mix of parents, scholarships, loans, and part-time jobs. Even at the time I was never under any illusions about how the funding model worked. I didn't have to "discover" anything.
Having a bunch of friends within walking distance was nice, but I certainly wouldn't want to return to that lifestyle even if it was free. It was ultimately very limiting and insular.
Well, I think single family home suburb-style neighborhoods are even more insular, but I do think this is a good criticism of the residential campus model.
I guess I think the common immediately post-college model of moving to a small apartment in a dense city with a mix of people smushed together is a better way to get out of a bubble.
But I wish it was more common to go back to more like the campus model for family-raising, with kids of all ages around each other with lots of common spaces they can walk and bike to, with shared lighter touch supervision by all the adults.
But I recognize that this is largely just utopian wishful thinking :)
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.
You ever walked a mile carrying two armfuls of groceries? That’s brutal without a car, and without public transit nearby, that makes it incredibly inconvenient and difficult to have food in the fridge. Get outta here with your feigned sarcasm, it’s a legitimate problem.
The smart and motivated ones will try to get to the grocery store. Unfortunately, for most, those services do so much more harm than good. What makes sense for a wealthy professional to pay for the convenience of food or grocery delivery ends up being a small fortune for a lot of young people who can't afford a car to go to the grocery store.
It's a clear short- vs long-term thinking issue, but the reality is most young people are living with so little hope for the future that denying immediate pleasures in search of a future payoff seems naive and pointless.
Yep, a mile is too far for a grocery store. We need more, smaller grocery stores. But the economics don't work out in most places. No idea how to solve this kind of issue.
It's not the distance; it's the time. Walking 20 minutes to a subway station only to wait 10-20 minutes on an unreliable train to take a 10-45 minute subway ride only to finish with another 20 minute walk is not remotely efficient. I've calculated in my city that for some routes, it's only barely twice as fast to take the subway over walking the entire way. Spending over an hour one way is not acceptable when it takes less than half that time to just drive, even in heavy traffic.
Others have already talking about the time and trouble of carrying things...
But something else worth mentioning is weather. This is the Pacific Northwest. It rains a LOT here. From mid-October to April, the rain feels non-stop.
Walking two miles in the rain nearly every day for six months starts to take a mental toll.
It's not when the infrastructure is well-designed for it. There's a new grocery store a little over a mile away from me that I've biked to a few times now and that's not so bad, though there are thankfully some quieter back streets that can take me to it. Looking at that Google Maps view GP posted though I'm not sure I'd feel safe riding there.
A mile on foot isn't far either. The people living in those much vaunted walkable European cities think little of walking a few kilometers in a day; it's the American tourists who balk at that.
If you want a walkable city lifestyle but you also think walking a mile is unreasonable, your need a reality check. I'm going to walk to the park today to see the ducks, it's 1.5 miles away one way. I'm going to get groceries on the way back. I do this often, it's literally no big deal.
> 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.
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.
The cities of the 1920s where absolutely horrific places to live. They were filthy and polluted. People fled them to the suburbs for a reason: because they were terrible.
Racism: that's the word you're looking for. Not "filthy" nor "polluted." They, which we mean white people, because they're the only ones that fled, left because of racism. The well documented white flight from urban centers to suburbs of the 50s & 60s was 100% because of racist white folk that didn't want to live next to Black people. That's all it is.
This is…factually incorrect, and honestly insulting.
No I mean actual measurable particulate counts in the air around factories, and the industrial vehicles moving goods in and out of those factories. When people talk about “environmental racism”, that is: making poor people live in the worst parts of town, they’re talking about the environmental aspects of those parts of town.
They left as soon as it became practical to leave (introduction of cars and suburbs) because of crime. The crime rate back then was inconceivable to anybody living in America today.
That doesn't have anything to do with transportation though. You could also die of a kidney stone in the 1920s, but it isn't relevant to the public transportation that existed.
All of the reasons cities sucked are relevant to the decisions people made to leave cities as soon as cars made it practical for them to live outside of cities.
Housing was a lot denser in cities back then. Lots of low rise appartenant buildings, tall skinny houses built right next to each other, and trams running on the major boulevards. Appently modern fire codes killed those building designs though? And lobbyists killed the trams.
Can you give some examples of this pre 1950s los angeles that you wish you lived in?
I'm trying to find photos or accounts, but most of them seem to be people talking about or showing off how happy they are about having their own cars.
Los Angeles has busses that go absolutely everywhere, and even has a subway system, and yet people happily pay tens of thousands of dollars to own their own car so that they can go wherever they want.
I've never heard of somebody intentionally selling their car to take public transportation instead, certainly not in an American city. People take public transportation because they can't afford a car.
A friend of mine who lives in los angeles made a sad laugh when I complained "ugh, my subways are 12 mins apart". So I suspect public transport in los angeles forces people into cars because the other options suck.
So there is some non existent idealized theoretical public transportation system you are imagining that is better than having my own transportation system that takes me wherever i want whenever i want and with whoever i want?
Yeah, actually. I want to be able to read, study, catch up on work, get wasted with friends, nap, and not worry about insurance, parking, or killing anyone. All for cheaper than gas, repairs, tires, etc.
Yes that sounds great. Maybe each of us could have our own dedicated self driving waymo?
As it exists now, however: public transportation is terrible, and having a personal vehicle to take you where you want safely is universally preferable.
I didn't want to make assumptions, but as I've read more of your comments, I've found it increasingly implausible that you have ever traveled outside the US. If that's right, you really should do that sometime! It is useful to have a broader perspective on how the world lives.
Hey man if you wanna compare passports let’s go for it!
In the meantime: google image search photos of some of the Indian commuter trains I’ve ridden on and ask yourself why everybody with even a tiny bit of money hired a private driver.
Your comment about “broader perspective” is insulting, and I guarantee you that my perspective is quite a bit broader than “traveled to some glorified Disney land parks in Western Europe.”
Public transportation can be good or bad, depending on execution, unlike car-centric infrastructure which never scales and becomes more expensive and results in more deaths from everyday distractions, drunk drivers, etc. If I could live in the infrastructure of large Japanese cities, that would be awesome, because it means I could live out in the quiet of the burbs and still get smashed deep in Tokyo and go home at 4 am asleep with my suit tie wrapped around my forehead without a single concern.
Just because you haven't experienced it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist; in much of the world outside of America, public transport is not unpopular.
And your own transportation system is vastly inefficient in the task of getting you and thousands of other people where they need to go. In a world where people's destinations are wildly divergent and travellers are few, cars make more sense. But when you see a clogged interstate filled with cars all mostly going to the same or similar destinations, whose occupants could easily fit into a couple of buses, you start to see the logic behind public transportation.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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".
> 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.
It's more like certain sectors have seen growth, others are so regulated that not many people aspire to work in them. How many Smart kids enroll to be Nuclear Engineers instead of Computer Science, Finance or Business?
How many rocket Engineer jobs are out there besides at NASA or Space X?
Things that capture imagination and could be dream jobs just aren't hiring, aren't building or aren't paying
That cycles back into companies no longer train anyone. All the training has to be done by the kid schools with ridiculously inflated tuition. And if they don't pick something that will pretty much guarantee a job, like anything other than CS, they get put down by society for not picking a high paying major. The situation is not any of the kid's fault. This perverse system was put in place to wring kids for money, put them in debt, so a few of the oligarchy could feel safe and secure.
As someone on the border of being Gen Z, I think there is some truth to what you are saying. Especially on the not paying part. Lots of dream jobs are hiring.
If I think of what jobs would be most meaningful to me, it is things that are not paying. I could be a computer science teacher and after a long career still make less than I did in my first software job out of college.
If I want to afford to own a house or have a family, it's clear which career choice I have to make.
Owning a home and raising a family on a teacher's salary is entirely possible in many parts of the country. I literally know people who are doing it. But somehow the HN reality distortion bubble thinks that everywhere is like California. Try Iowa or Arkansas.
And I do think that we should build more housing in California, and other high cost areas. But realistically that's not going to happen soon. Zoomers who want to improve their lives today should look outside the fashionable cities.
I don't know why young people aren't willing to take on massive amounts of personal debt in order to get a job at 1 of roughly a dozen ethically compromised companies or their suppliers.
The notion of a dream job is rather silly. Historically very few people in prior generations ever had an opportunity to work in a dream job. They took a job they could find and got on with it instead of whining.
Today there are many other employers hiring rocket engineers. Try Boeing, Northrop Grumman, or RTX. A lot of experienced engineers are retiring so there are opportunities available. But you can't be picky about location.
I guess this is just my getting old moment. I watched planes fly into buildings, friends go off to war and die, and had memory of three economic crises by the time I was 24. Which was way better than my parents generation which was (arguably) better than my grandparents generation. This generation is complaining about... having phones?
I don't know, the 90s were kind of the peak. We've been pretty downhill since
And, I will admit a lot of indicators and below the surface trends were in the wrong direction since the 80s at least--the 00s are just went everything finally collapsed
like the other comment in reply to my parent, the 90s were relatively benign compared to the 60s/70s and the shit that 2001 ushered in
Were the 90s perfect? No, of course not. We had a very long economic boom, technology advancing in a very optimistic way (vs. today where technology is actively making things worse)
Now, what fed a lot of that caused a lot of our problems today--the 24 hour news cycle spun up, there were troubling economic trends like the fact that wages basically never went up after Reagan so I'm not saying that time has nothing to answer for
The 90s were pretty benign if you didn't live in the wrong place (like Eastern Europe, where life expectancy cratered after the fall of the Soviet Union). I mean, my memories of the 90s were pretty great, but I was a young adult in the US.
The 90's had a Marine division occupying LA so at least some ups and downs. Probably a relative bright spot between Vietnam&Stagflation and 9/11&Housing bubble though.
You’re having your old man moment because you’re reading an article designed to make you feel like the youth are stupid people and you, as an older person, are smarter with more real problems.
You are the exact target of this article and you are being persuaded by it.
This generation grew up in the middle of at least two of those economic crises, has witnessed countless riots, faced down a soul-crushing pandemic at the peak of their childhood, and has lived their entire life without even a shred of hope in their political system. The few of us who got blessed by the tech lottery live comfortably, while the rest live with no hope of making a decent living, owning our own house, or starting a family.
This article discusses Gen Z diving into their phones as a symptom of the generational malaise, but don't mistake the symptom for the cause.
The problem is that it's impossible to get all of your peers to put down their phones at the same time and do the hard work of rebuilding normal social structures and low tech communications channels.
You (a teenager) can invite your peers to your house to hang out for some hours after school or on the weekend. In the past they would accept because they had nothing better to do, or if they did, that would be communicated and everyone would join. Today your peers are likely to just decline the invitation. There is plenty of entertainment at home: their phone. And if they came over to your house, they would mostly scroll on their phones anyway. It's a widespread, untreated, mostly-unrecognized addiction.
Imagine how difficult it would be to quit heroin if all of your friends and all of their friends had to quit heroin at the same time or else no one can. The government will step in eventually.
No offense: I think you're missing the point. Phones are just the vector (that is also a kind of status symbol) for a few powerful types of social needles, each filled with a drug that attacks various mental feedback loops that debilitate you, and that those drugs are business models affecting your kids (if you have any) should cause some concern as society stratifies physically, socially, and economically. Wars and businesses have life spans. This situation becomes life. I think there's a significant difference. YMMV, especially if you live someplace where you can physically avoid the issues which at this point is the most viable strategy.
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.
If phones are so addictive, how come I can put mine away? I'm human too, not special. Many things are designed to be addictive: TV, alcohol, sugar and salt are also addictive. Shall we ban them all?
We bring the big bad banhammer down whenever someone cannot deal with their addiction. Every ban erodes our freedoms, bit by bit.
Why not just go live in China? There the authorities are happy to tell you what you can and cannot do with every aspect of your life.
>If phones are so addictive, how come I can put mine away?
You are not everybody. There are people more susceptible to addiction than you, and likely people less susceptible to addiction than you as well. Should the Sacklers have been allowed to keep lying about the addictive qualities of Oxycontin despite there being people who "cannot deal with their addiction?"
That's basically reductio ad absurdum and a common refrain I see on HN. Restricting the worst dark patterns in software is not an affront to human freedom. Banning selling cigarettes to kids is not the same as Uighur concentration camps.
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).
> taking away the phone will solve everything (it won't).
Very true. Indeed, with my understanding of addiction one thing I fear
we'd have to endure with a step change - like a backlash where
millions of young people dump their phones, or an large scale failure
of technology, is that they wouldn't know what to do with themselves.
Plunged from a superficially meaningful digital holding-pen into an
empty real world would be insane. Positive cultural change has to
happen slowly enough.
> 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.
I don't believe wealth is a factor in understanding per se. To my
eyes, the poverty of life that accompanies a smartphone lifestyle is
equally hurtful to rich and poor alike.
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.
We live in a utopia of usurers, we've forced our children into unforgivable debt to "get a good job" before they have a chance to earn a cent, we've pushed education, housing and now automobiles beyond all reason via debt finance. When they complain we say "Well, you signed the contract" because we've lost all sense of morality in financial and economic matters. We even deny the language necessary to understand their situation to our children: when is the last time the church, let alone an economist, even mentioned the term usury?
We need a debt jubilee, as Steve Keen has been saying for a decade now. But we won't, for the same reason he's been ridiculed for a decade now.
We small time usurers will find, very late in the game, that our money doesn't mean much when the social contract has been shattered.
This is flawed. We live in an era of cheap, everflowing credit. When you speak of usury, keep in mind that lenders in earlier times could charge many times the original loan amount, that there was a stigma associated to being in debt, that becoming insolvent would mean a criminal record and jail time. You're comparing that to 2.5%, 5%, 10%, and calling it usurious?? Read some history, would ya?
What we have nowadays is mainly a case of mismatched expectations. All children are told that they are special, and that when they become an adult, a car, a nice job and a McMansion awaits them. These statements glossed over the reality of hard work and mapping skills to outcomes. It was never possible to guarantee this for everyone. Now kids are finding out the hard way that not all of them will get what they were promised, and in fact most won't.
We have kept rates low (for rich people and governments, poor people still pay through the nose) because we have to to avoid a debt crisis, which has driven up prices to the moon which, again, benefits the existing owners of capital to the detriment of people with little capital, such as our children. Now we are against the wall and have to pick between higher rates and inflation, and we may get both for our trouble. There is a reason the Hebrews, and most stable ancient civilizations, had a debt jubilee roughly every 50 years, and the church, after the Roman empire experience, forbid usury.
I would be willing to wager that have read far more, and far different, history that you.
I highly doubt your claims of historical acumen given the bold statement calling current interest rates "usury". For reference, here's a plot of the real interest rate in US over 150 years:
https://www.longtermtrends.net/real-interest-rate/
As you can see, it's not even close to the 150 year peak. Now, US is a new country, relatively speaking. Let's look at Europe. From Rutgers, have a look at the graph on page 8 detailing interest rates from 1300 CE to now:
I understand why you are upset. The federal govt. tried to forgive student debt last year and it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court due to challenges brought by some Republican members. The govt. is trying again this year, as of two days ago: https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/biden-harris-administ...
During the pandemic, the federal govt. paused all interest payments on student debt, effectively setting the payable interest rate to zero. That moratorium ran from 2020 and expired just last month, in Sept 2023: https://studentaid.gov/announcements-events/covid-19
Prior to that, the Obama administration launched a student loan forgiveness programe called PAYE (Pay As You Earn) in Oct 2011, which was later expanded to the REPAYE program to reduce the barrier to entry. Lots of sources available online to read about this, here's one: https://www.debt.org/students/obama-pay-as-you-earn/#:~:text....
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
The whole self-destructive behaviour is clearly addiction.
And no one, except the addict, is ever going to cure it.
Real life sucks. People have sought escapism for ever. Do you really think there's something called a "dream job"? Seriously? A job is something people endure so they can live inside, with electricity.
This myth that there used to be engaging stimulating employment that made people feel fulfilled is just part of the escape mentality.
Having to face physical reality is what's missing for gen z. It's not fun, or fulfilling, but in the aftermath there is a sense of self preservation that will never come from the opium of twerk tic "influencers".
I was a teenager of the '70s, we pursued PLENTY of escapes from reality. But the big difference is that after 6 or 8 hours, the LSD wore off! The phone is 24/7, and this is the root of the problem.
Sorry to break it to you, but this idea that the world is what's the problem is just plain wrong. The world has ALWAYS been an exploitive murderous place, but previously people had to come to grips with that, whereas with the cyber-escape, people can live forever in a goggle fueled delerium.
Put down the phone, go outside, talk to people IRL.
It reads like "life is suffering" and tbf unless you were born in first world high class that's hard to argue against.
Still, that'd mean that there's failure in parenting, as gen z seems to be ill-equipped to handle what's there - assuming that's all there is to it.
Talking to people is exactly what they're doing but the talking happens through intermediaries who spy on every interaction because they want to increase advertising revenue. The truth is that the advertising model is corrosive because it treats people like products to be bought and sold for profit. The cognitive framework imposed by social media companies is one of the main drivers of social decay and the general lack of hope about the future.
I've talked to veterans at bars and the stories they tell about how they worked and lived is entirely alien to anyone who grew up with the internet and smartphones. These people worked the same jobs for 30+ years and are now retired with pensions or disability benefits. The kind of stability that was afforded to the older generations is no longer available to anyone. No one will ever work at a single job for 30+ years and then retire with full benefits. Whatever economic and social circumstances made that possible are long gone.
>The Millennials were largely spared from the carnage because all but the last few years of them were beyond puberty when the phone-based childhood swept in.
Every generation thinks its suffering is unique and worse than those before it. Read Douglas Coupland's early 90s novels (Generation X and Microserfs) to see how Gen X fared in contrast to their parents. Watch Eden of the East to see how middle-Millenials struggled with the rising concept of the NEET (in Japan, the US, and western Europe alike) as our Gen X and Baby Boomer parents couldn't understand the difference in economic and life circumstances between being 23 in 1980 and being 23 in 2008.
Smartphones and social media are accelerating the decline, but there's evidence collected over the past ~60 years that points to a trend of diminishing quality of life. A great non-fiction economics-oriented book on the US version of this is The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War by Robert Gordon. (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691147727/th...)
Every recent generation has felt like they have it harder than their parents, and it is usually brushed off as just hindsight bias. But I feel like we don’t look at it enough that maybe things have actually gotten worse overall (for those of us in relatively rich countries).
I think a lot of things have gotten better in the last ~60 years, especially medicine, in terms of improving the lives of people. But some things, especially community related, have definitely gotten worse. And maybe those things are more important to our health than we’ve given credit to.
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.
The summary is that traditional sources of meaning — marriage, friends, patriotism, career, childbearing, and faith — are now devalued, and cell phones offer in their place corporate solutions that are harmful.
As can be expected, Haidt and the poster argue that solutions are found at the level of the cell phone and limiting access to it, rather than improvements at the social level where the boomer, gen x, and increasingly millennial generations continue to fail to deliver meaning through the aforementioned institutions.
If Gen Z could look to society and especially older generations for
- interpersonal relationships based on cooperation rather than competition
- work that was meaningfully compensated rather than exploitative
- governments that were responsive to their constituents rather than self-serving
- social support systems that reward rather than punish parenting, or
- religious institutions that delivered compassion and moral goodness rather than prejudice and contempt,
then I think it could be argued that folks could find meaning in these institutions instead of behind a phone screen. Until then the complaints about social decay are almost insulting.
I'm reminded of the "useful myths" concept in the book Sapiens. Being very patriotic, very confident in your religion and politics was useful for most of human history. Even if you're wrong, the confidence gives you purpose, and peace. Gen-Z seems more nuanced about all of these things. I think I blame the Internet. Speaking very very broadly, millennials grew up with this type of confidence, but abandoned it in adulthood, when they became educated and emotionally ready to do so. Gen-Z has not had the same time to prepare. As teens or young adults, they are having all this thrust on them, and getting hit with nihilism really early.
Boomers are dying. Gen Z are welcome to take charge of these institutions and transform them as they see fit. I know some who are doing exactly that, and are much happier than the subject matter of the article.
Ultimately people are looking for meaning and purpose to their existence. There are productive ways to get there, and then there are destructive ways. Everyone needs to pick their own path.
>not because of any material factors like housing unaffordability.
I agree this is a major problem, especially here in Canada.
But what makes you think these people will suddenly be satisified when they own a home or live on their own? It's more cost and more responsibility, and isn't automatically fulfilling in any special way, is it?
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.
What nonsense. If the phone's your problem, just put it down. Stay away from it. Give it back to your parents. I'm sure they'd love to pare down that data plan. It costs money after all.
As a millenial, things weren't that different for us. We had AoL, ICQ, MSN messenger. Folks played Quake, Starcraft, Everquest. WoW came out just as many of us entered university. Some of us flunked out because we gamed too much.
To Gen Z: Look, there are no substitutes for hard work and self control. If it's important, work at it. If it's bad for you, put it down. Delay isn't going to change anything. An 18 year old smoker is just as addicted as a 10 year old smoker.
We can make progress once people start taking responsibility for themselves.
This blog post is an incredibly Conservative (capital C) take on social issues, to the point where it reads like it was written by the very same kind of person that and Gen Z and millennials are often griping about to begin with.
It starts out, off the bat, by reframing structural social issues as individual failures: it's mental illness, suicide, anxiety, cancel culture, coddling. Then it tries to make the point that phones enable this sort of collective doom-scrolling escapism.
Then it tries to present an actual anecdote from a Gen Z person to reinforce the viewpoint that liberal ideology (non-monogamy, shame about American issues, quiet-quitting, climate change, anti-religion) are the cause of this discontent... but then instead of addressing any of them, it tries again to reframe those issues as a personal addiction to smartphones. As if Gen Z would be happier simply by turning off their phones (which is probably true, granted, but doesn't really address any of the underlying social issues).
It's a weird strawman: Nevermind that the world is broken. You're just on your phone too much.
Then what happens after they turn it off? Still a shit economy, no good jobs unless you want to work in tech or finance (and even then...), climate change getting worse, nobody can afford housing, education is increasingly worthless, culture wars are getting more polarized...
I'd argue the opposite cause/effect: People are on their phones so much because that's all that's left to do in a dying world, because previous generations hoarded so much for themselves there's nothing left for the future.
There are real issues in the world for sure, but stressing about them as if I can actually DO something about them is wasted energy. Reading about the significant structural issues I can't fix is stressful. The only way I can reduce that stress is by not reading it.
It doesn't go away if I don't read about it, but why subject myself to such needless anguish in the first place? Doomscrolling is a choice. Reading the news is a choice. Yes, this is my privilege speaking because I live in the middle of nowhere where nothing ever happens so I don't have to stay informed for my own safety. I choose to live somewhere with that level of safety cushion, and I give up all the "benefits" of living in the city for this privilege.
I don't think there is any disagreement that addictive doom-scrolling is bad for you -- regardless of your age & generation & political leanings. It's just not a complete (or, I'd argue, majority) explanation for the hardships of younger people today. It's also confusing cause and effect. It makes no sense to blame these generations for the simple act of learning about what's going on around them, caused by people other than them.
Even if you turn off your phone, all those social issues making it hard for these generations will still be there, in a way that wasn't the same for our parents and grandparents. Even if you can't do anything about these, they still directly affect your livability and haunt your life in profound ways.
All the generational peers I know are basically separated into two groups: the tech people are fine (or better), and everyone else is struggling. Of the latter group, the better-off among us can rent alone or with a partner, maybe buy a cheap house in a rural area. The majority cannot.
And our predecessors' political and environmental failures compound every year to the point where they can't just be ignored even if we wanted to just hide, between wildfires and shootings and abortion and homophobia and transphobia... these have real everyday impacts to many of the people I know, even though none of them are doomscrollers. You can't just hide from the world and pretend like there are no issues when they're actively affecting you.
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 get along with zoomers. They’re the most informed and out to of touch people I talk to. Parents aren’t equipped to talk to them because parents aren’t very honest and they’re out of touch. It’s an age old story really.
I think the problem is bigger than the young author would like to admit. She's correct that Zoomers probably have it worse than previous generations as the victims of a psychological capitalism that seeks to profit by hollowing out their sense of self worth. But I think those forces got started a while ago. Companies were already clawing at people's attention in various ways, and treating it rather like a science, well before those efforts were distilled into algorithms.
Maybe the bigger problem is society's tolerance of mega companies that become so large that no one employee feels responsible for their abuses.
Many of the negative effects of social media and phone use seem to point to infinite feeds of content as the root cause. I spent my teens scrolling a Facebook feed that largely consisted of updates from my friends (with a few meme pages sprinkled in between). Most of my time was spent reacting to posts and engaging in lively discussions in long comment threads instead of passively viewing content, and the feed didn't randomly reshuffle itself the way it does now so you'd naturally stop scrolling once you'd caught up with the day's updates. I actually felt closer to my friends as a result. Using BeReal feels like using Facebook in its earlier days because it has a finite feed, and it seems to be the only social media app that encourages you to engage with people instead of content.
I get the sense that most ad-monetised social media apps are forced to show an algorithmic feed that maximises ad impressions; otherwise advertisers will just move to a platform that does.
I suspect that even BeReal will do this at some point unless they pivot to e.g. Cohost’s [1] model of paying a monthly fee.
Unfortunately achieving the network effects required for a successful social media app is at odds with the friction involved in paying for a subscription service. As such, “cool” apps like BeReal don’t stay cool for very long IMO.
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 don’t think it’s the phones, because a lot of us here were hooked on the internet (cellphones, laptops, forums, message boards, Usenet, email newsletter, rss, etc) from a very early age and we didn’t come out thinking that monogamy was debunked, community is passé, friends are obsolete, gender is like…just a vibe and communism is unicorns and rainbows and capitalism is the devil. Also religious people are trash (except for astrology) and the more promiscuous you are the more your moral virtue and all opinions are valid and equal no matter the source or the content
It’s this myth that gen z if the fist generation growing up with modern tech that goes unchallenged
I think it’s of more what the adults are teaching the kids that’s harming them. Ideological stuff, not tech.
foxyv | 2 years ago
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.
stcredzero | 2 years ago
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.
toomuchtodo | 2 years ago
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/
switchbak | 2 years ago
mnky9800n | 2 years ago
mikestew | 2 years ago
HDThoreaun | 2 years ago
jedberg | 2 years ago
KittenInABox | 2 years ago
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.
gen220 | 2 years ago
Nominal fees are like congestion pricing. If you don't have them, the space loses its ability to fulfill its original purpose.
KittenInABox | 2 years ago
xwdv | 2 years ago
smt88 | 2 years ago
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.
hotpotamus | 2 years ago
itsoktocry | 2 years ago
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.
mixdup | 2 years ago
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
mintplant | 2 years ago
dingnuts | 2 years ago
Please, talk to the people in your lives about politics, or the polarization will only continue to intensify. Common ground is found through dialog, not through cutting everyone in your life out because they fall to one side or another of an arbitrary ideological goalpost that you've decided is the critical opinion everyone needs to agree with in order to be blessed with your presence.
I say this because Jon Haidt started this website, among other things:
https://civilpolitics.org
If Haidt and those like him are getting lumped in with the MAGA election-denying types, we're all screwed.
vore | 2 years ago
mcpackieh | 2 years ago
And you certainly don't have to be a conservative to become dissatisfied with internet dating. It genuinely sucks for a lot of people who just want to find somebody who understands them. Getting your dick sucked is great but wanting something more than that doesn't intrinsically make you a conservative.
I think you're just seeing what you want to see. These are the kind of things anybody with liberal or progressive political opinions can find themselves feeling.
vore | 2 years ago
mcpackieh | 2 years ago
> Having [an] entire grab bag of [concerns] listed like this is undeniably conservative.
Ridiculous. Anybody who has multiple concerns in their life will have a list of concerns. Articulating this isn't a conservative trait, it's just basic self reflection. If you don't have a list of concerns with your own life then you're obviously doing very well. But just because you can't relate to people who's lives aren't as great as yours doesn't mean those people are conservative.
(You see I swapped out "the" with "an". Because that list is not The entire grab bag of characteristically conservative concerns. There's no mention of immigration, guns, abortion, voter IDs, crime rates, fear of carbon taxes and corporate regulations, drag-queen story hours, critical theory and progressive school teaches or really anything like any of that. It's clearly not "The" list of conservative concerns. You're characterizing it that way because that's what you want to see for some reason. Maybe you tripped over the mention of religion, but if you put stereotypes aside and look at public opinion polling, you will find that religion in America is largely bipartisan. Even the denominations that lean strongly one way still have millions of adherents who lean the other, e.g. 28% of evangelical protestants who lean Democrat. 55% of American Democrats report that their belief in God is absolutely certain and an additional 21% say their belief is fairly certain.)
vore | 2 years ago
mcpackieh | 2 years ago
I don't think you can give me a substantive response to this, but give it a shot. You could at least try.
NoGravitas | 2 years ago
mintplant | 2 years ago
303uru | 2 years ago
mikestew | 2 years ago
There's only one person that I see in this branch of comments trying to lump Haidt in with the MAGA-hat-wearers. One can be a conservative without a red hat. To put it another way, what, you're going to argue that Haidt is progressive? It doesn't take much of a glance at the URL you listed to determine that just isn't the case.
brightball | 2 years ago
I live in a low cost of living area, that's car dependent. Yes, houses are expensive because _everybody_ is moving to these areas and there's construction everywhere. House prices went up here because so many people started fleeing dense areas when remote opportunities became common. But even 2 miles from my current house you can get a big 3 bedroom apartment for about $900 / month in a good location. Get 2 roommates and your rent is $300 / month.
But the flip side of this should be cause and effect. If people are leaving other areas in higher numbers then there should be deals in those areas.
maxdoop | 2 years ago
brightball | 2 years ago
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.
nradov | 2 years ago
I expect the vagueness doctrine would also present an obstacle. How could legislators even define social media in a sufficiently precise way? Is email or group chat social media?
mcpackieh | 2 years ago
(Technically it's not a complete ban because it has an exception for parental permission, but it's a de facto ban because companies don't want to deal with it.)
Der_Einzige | 2 years ago
bedobi | 2 years ago
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
colechristensen | 2 years ago
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?
mnky9800n | 2 years ago
https://matduggan.com/developers-guide-to-moving-to-denmark/
colechristensen | 2 years ago
I'm talking about waitresses, cashiers, shelf restockers, CNAs and whomever else on the bottom scale of pay not being able to afford anything but rent.
nradov | 2 years ago
colechristensen | 2 years ago
I also don't think orange juice with a little bit of cheap sparkling wine should be an unattainable luxury for anyone with a job.
I don't think my breakfast was worth a day's labor for a big chunk of the society I live in.
nradov | 2 years ago
Any kind of wine at breakfast has always been considered a luxury reserved for special occasions.
glimshe | 2 years ago
No person is entitled to have others serving them on the cheap; if we want servers and cooks to be well paid, then restaurant food will have to cost a pretty penny.
By the way, you can make the very same breakfast at home for less than $10/person, including the mimosa, and barely $5/person without it.
HDThoreaun | 2 years ago
macNchz | 2 years ago
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_...
0max | 2 years ago
Pieces from the New York Post would prolly make parents not want their kids to take MUNI regularly.
sanderjd | 2 years ago
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.
mixdup | 2 years ago
Do places in the US and other countries with good public transit or are walkable like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, etc somehow not have any of the problems the article is referring to? I kind of doubt it
There's plenty wrong with how car dependent we are in most of the US but it's both not new to the latest generation and not uniform across the entire country yet there IS something that is uniform across the entire country AND new for this generation. Spoiler alert: it's not suburban sprawl.
sanderjd | 2 years ago
But your last paragraph seems to be once again missing the "takes as a given ... that the proximate cause of the issue is phone / social media centrism" part. Nobody in this thread has argued against that problem.
nradov | 2 years ago
Having a bunch of friends within walking distance was nice, but I certainly wouldn't want to return to that lifestyle even if it was free. It was ultimately very limiting and insular.
sanderjd | 2 years ago
I guess I think the common immediately post-college model of moving to a small apartment in a dense city with a mix of people smushed together is a better way to get out of a bubble.
But I wish it was more common to go back to more like the campus model for family-raising, with kids of all ages around each other with lots of common spaces they can walk and bike to, with shared lighter touch supervision by all the adults.
But I recognize that this is largely just utopian wishful thinking :)
Sohcahtoa82 | 2 years ago
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
hondo77 | 2 years ago
The horror.
jonwest | 2 years ago
hondo77 | 2 years ago
SirMaster | 2 years ago
I thought all the young people are doing things like DoorDash, Hello Fresh or Amazon Fresh etc.
Not saying they should be doing that so much, but seems like they aren’t interested in shopping at a Grocery store.
tyg13 | 2 years ago
It's a clear short- vs long-term thinking issue, but the reality is most young people are living with so little hope for the future that denying immediate pleasures in search of a future payoff seems naive and pointless.
sanderjd | 2 years ago
bmitc | 2 years ago
hondo77 | 2 years ago
bmitc | 2 years ago
Sohcahtoa82 | 2 years ago
But something else worth mentioning is weather. This is the Pacific Northwest. It rains a LOT here. From mid-October to April, the rain feels non-stop.
Walking two miles in the rain nearly every day for six months starts to take a mental toll.
seiferteric | 2 years ago
ryukafalz | 2 years ago
mcpackieh | 2 years ago
If you want a walkable city lifestyle but you also think walking a mile is unreasonable, your need a reality check. I'm going to walk to the park today to see the ducks, it's 1.5 miles away one way. I'm going to get groceries on the way back. I do this often, it's literally no big deal.
ZoomerCretin | 2 years ago
It's odd to me that at these prices, roommates (the kind you share a room with) are not more common.
xboxnolifes | 2 years ago
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.
thepasswordis | 2 years ago
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.
lainga | 2 years ago
thepasswordis | 2 years ago
malcolmgreaves | 2 years ago
thepasswordis | 2 years ago
No I mean actual measurable particulate counts in the air around factories, and the industrial vehicles moving goods in and out of those factories. When people talk about “environmental racism”, that is: making poor people live in the worst parts of town, they’re talking about the environmental aspects of those parts of town.
mcpackieh | 2 years ago
bmitc | 2 years ago
mcpackieh | 2 years ago
morkalork | 2 years ago
jmyeet | 2 years ago
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.
thepasswordis | 2 years ago
I'm trying to find photos or accounts, but most of them seem to be people talking about or showing off how happy they are about having their own cars.
Los Angeles has busses that go absolutely everywhere, and even has a subway system, and yet people happily pay tens of thousands of dollars to own their own car so that they can go wherever they want.
I've never heard of somebody intentionally selling their car to take public transportation instead, certainly not in an American city. People take public transportation because they can't afford a car.
KittenInABox | 2 years ago
thepasswordis | 2 years ago
KittenInABox | 2 years ago
thepasswordis | 2 years ago
As it exists now, however: public transportation is terrible, and having a personal vehicle to take you where you want safely is universally preferable.
sanderjd | 2 years ago
thepasswordis | 2 years ago
In the meantime: google image search photos of some of the Indian commuter trains I’ve ridden on and ask yourself why everybody with even a tiny bit of money hired a private driver.
Your comment about “broader perspective” is insulting, and I guarantee you that my perspective is quite a bit broader than “traveled to some glorified Disney land parks in Western Europe.”
KittenInABox | 2 years ago
tyg13 | 2 years ago
And your own transportation system is vastly inefficient in the task of getting you and thousands of other people where they need to go. In a world where people's destinations are wildly divergent and travellers are few, cars make more sense. But when you see a clogged interstate filled with cars all mostly going to the same or similar destinations, whose occupants could easily fit into a couple of buses, you start to see the logic behind public transportation.
AnimalMuppet | 2 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Electric
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Railway
BytesAndGears | 2 years ago
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
chlodwig | 2 years ago
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.
ripply | 2 years ago
sanderjd | 2 years ago
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.
em-bee | 2 years ago
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.
nradov | 2 years ago
em-bee | 2 years ago
emmet | 2 years ago
thepasswordis | 2 years ago
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.
fzzzy | 2 years ago
thepasswordis | 2 years ago
emmet | 2 years ago
LesZedCB | 2 years ago
you have to pay exorbitant prices to be somewhere (the third place) in society with people. it's expensive to socialize.
morkalork | 2 years ago
emmanuel_1234 | 2 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.
lettergram | 2 years ago
> 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.
Arelius | 2 years ago
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.
throwawayqqq11 | 2 years ago
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.
sanderjd | 2 years ago
This could not possibly be more the opposite of the case.
itsoktocry | 2 years ago
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.
marssaxman | 2 years ago
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.
next_xibalba | 2 years ago
Real wage growth has been stalled out since the 1970s, several generations before Gen Z.
sanderjd | 2 years ago
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.
lupyro | 2 years ago
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.
chlodwig | 2 years ago
My impression is that there is far less of this now than there was thirty years ago or fifty years ago.
ctoth | 2 years ago
Is it possible it actually might be the phones somehow as she argues?
sanderjd | 2 years ago
And I might suggest that the author of the essay very likely hasn't considered this next level deeper, because "this is water".
nunez | 2 years ago
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.
lamontcg | 2 years ago
1. Phones and social media 2. Anomie
pauldenton | 2 years ago
mostlysimilar | 2 years ago
Can you talk more about this and cite some sources?
downrightmike | 2 years ago
bigbillheck | 2 years ago
EdTechAndrew | 2 years ago
If I think of what jobs would be most meaningful to me, it is things that are not paying. I could be a computer science teacher and after a long career still make less than I did in my first software job out of college.
If I want to afford to own a house or have a family, it's clear which career choice I have to make.
nradov | 2 years ago
And I do think that we should build more housing in California, and other high cost areas. But realistically that's not going to happen soon. Zoomers who want to improve their lives today should look outside the fashionable cities.
barryrandall | 2 years ago
nradov | 2 years ago
Today there are many other employers hiring rocket engineers. Try Boeing, Northrop Grumman, or RTX. A lot of experienced engineers are retiring so there are opportunities available. But you can't be picky about location.
treis | 2 years ago
Bah, get off my lawn so I can yell at a cloud.
mixdup | 2 years ago
And, I will admit a lot of indicators and below the surface trends were in the wrong direction since the 80s at least--the 00s are just went everything finally collapsed
mvdtnz | 2 years ago
Are you sure this isn't just nostalgia? There was a lot going wrong in the 90's.
mixdup | 2 years ago
Were the 90s perfect? No, of course not. We had a very long economic boom, technology advancing in a very optimistic way (vs. today where technology is actively making things worse)
Now, what fed a lot of that caused a lot of our problems today--the 24 hour news cycle spun up, there were troubling economic trends like the fact that wages basically never went up after Reagan so I'm not saying that time has nothing to answer for
NoGravitas | 2 years ago
Apocryphon | 2 years ago
treis | 2 years ago
frabcus | 2 years ago
jncfhnb | 2 years ago
You are the exact target of this article and you are being persuaded by it.
tyg13 | 2 years ago
This article discusses Gen Z diving into their phones as a symptom of the generational malaise, but don't mistake the symptom for the cause.
Atheros | 2 years ago
You (a teenager) can invite your peers to your house to hang out for some hours after school or on the weekend. In the past they would accept because they had nothing better to do, or if they did, that would be communicated and everyone would join. Today your peers are likely to just decline the invitation. There is plenty of entertainment at home: their phone. And if they came over to your house, they would mostly scroll on their phones anyway. It's a widespread, untreated, mostly-unrecognized addiction.
Imagine how difficult it would be to quit heroin if all of your friends and all of their friends had to quit heroin at the same time or else no one can. The government will step in eventually.
JALTU | 2 years ago
chasebank | 2 years ago
glitchc | 2 years ago
iris2004 | 2 years ago
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.
glitchc | 2 years ago
We bring the big bad banhammer down whenever someone cannot deal with their addiction. Every ban erodes our freedoms, bit by bit.
Why not just go live in China? There the authorities are happy to tell you what you can and cannot do with every aspect of your life.
I_Am_Nous | 2 years ago
You are not everybody. There are people more susceptible to addiction than you, and likely people less susceptible to addiction than you as well. Should the Sacklers have been allowed to keep lying about the addictive qualities of Oxycontin despite there being people who "cannot deal with their addiction?"
iris2004 | 2 years ago
That's basically reductio ad absurdum and a common refrain I see on HN. Restricting the worst dark patterns in software is not an affront to human freedom. Banning selling cigarettes to kids is not the same as Uighur concentration camps.
nonrandomstring | 2 years ago
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)
wtfwhateven | 2 years ago
nonrandomstring | 2 years ago
Very true. Indeed, with my understanding of addiction one thing I fear we'd have to endure with a step change - like a backlash where millions of young people dump their phones, or an large scale failure of technology, is that they wouldn't know what to do with themselves. Plunged from a superficially meaningful digital holding-pen into an empty real world would be insane. Positive cultural change has to happen slowly enough.
> 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.
I don't believe wealth is a factor in understanding per se. To my eyes, the poverty of life that accompanies a smartphone lifestyle is equally hurtful to rich and poor alike.
NoGravitas | 2 years ago
wredue | 2 years ago
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.
recursivedoubts | 2 years ago
We live in a utopia of usurers, we've forced our children into unforgivable debt to "get a good job" before they have a chance to earn a cent, we've pushed education, housing and now automobiles beyond all reason via debt finance. When they complain we say "Well, you signed the contract" because we've lost all sense of morality in financial and economic matters. We even deny the language necessary to understand their situation to our children: when is the last time the church, let alone an economist, even mentioned the term usury?
We need a debt jubilee, as Steve Keen has been saying for a decade now. But we won't, for the same reason he's been ridiculed for a decade now.
We small time usurers will find, very late in the game, that our money doesn't mean much when the social contract has been shattered.
glitchc | 2 years ago
What we have nowadays is mainly a case of mismatched expectations. All children are told that they are special, and that when they become an adult, a car, a nice job and a McMansion awaits them. These statements glossed over the reality of hard work and mapping skills to outcomes. It was never possible to guarantee this for everyone. Now kids are finding out the hard way that not all of them will get what they were promised, and in fact most won't.
recursivedoubts | 2 years ago
I would be willing to wager that have read far more, and far different, history that you.
glitchc | 2 years ago
As you can see, it's not even close to the 150 year peak. Now, US is a new country, relatively speaking. Let's look at Europe. From Rutgers, have a look at the graph on page 8 detailing interest rates from 1300 CE to now:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...
Speaking of debt jubilees, we are in one right now as far as university and college students are concerned.
But certainly, don't let facts get in the way of your rhetoric.
turtlesdown11 | 2 years ago
What on earth are you talking about? Provide a link of all student loan debt forgiveness please. Don't let facts get in the way of your rhetoric.
glitchc | 2 years ago
During the pandemic, the federal govt. paused all interest payments on student debt, effectively setting the payable interest rate to zero. That moratorium ran from 2020 and expired just last month, in Sept 2023: https://studentaid.gov/announcements-events/covid-19
Prior to that, the Obama administration launched a student loan forgiveness programe called PAYE (Pay As You Earn) in Oct 2011, which was later expanded to the REPAYE program to reduce the barrier to entry. Lots of sources available online to read about this, here's one: https://www.debt.org/students/obama-pay-as-you-earn/#:~:text....
goodroot | 2 years ago
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.
LesZedCB | 2 years ago
gedy | 2 years ago
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)
goodroot | 2 years ago
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.
alx_the_new_guy | 2 years ago
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.
goodroot | 2 years ago
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.
tippytippytango | 2 years ago
johnea | 2 years ago
The whole self-destructive behaviour is clearly addiction.
And no one, except the addict, is ever going to cure it.
Real life sucks. People have sought escapism for ever. Do you really think there's something called a "dream job"? Seriously? A job is something people endure so they can live inside, with electricity.
This myth that there used to be engaging stimulating employment that made people feel fulfilled is just part of the escape mentality.
Having to face physical reality is what's missing for gen z. It's not fun, or fulfilling, but in the aftermath there is a sense of self preservation that will never come from the opium of twerk tic "influencers".
I was a teenager of the '70s, we pursued PLENTY of escapes from reality. But the big difference is that after 6 or 8 hours, the LSD wore off! The phone is 24/7, and this is the root of the problem.
Sorry to break it to you, but this idea that the world is what's the problem is just plain wrong. The world has ALWAYS been an exploitive murderous place, but previously people had to come to grips with that, whereas with the cyber-escape, people can live forever in a goggle fueled delerium.
Put down the phone, go outside, talk to people IRL.
That's your only hope...
bjablonski | 2 years ago
haltist | 2 years ago
I've talked to veterans at bars and the stories they tell about how they worked and lived is entirely alien to anyone who grew up with the internet and smartphones. These people worked the same jobs for 30+ years and are now retired with pensions or disability benefits. The kind of stability that was afforded to the older generations is no longer available to anyone. No one will ever work at a single job for 30+ years and then retire with full benefits. Whatever economic and social circumstances made that possible are long gone.
LesZedCB | 2 years ago
I would prefer not to.
Eiriksmal | 2 years ago
Every generation thinks its suffering is unique and worse than those before it. Read Douglas Coupland's early 90s novels (Generation X and Microserfs) to see how Gen X fared in contrast to their parents. Watch Eden of the East to see how middle-Millenials struggled with the rising concept of the NEET (in Japan, the US, and western Europe alike) as our Gen X and Baby Boomer parents couldn't understand the difference in economic and life circumstances between being 23 in 1980 and being 23 in 2008.
Smartphones and social media are accelerating the decline, but there's evidence collected over the past ~60 years that points to a trend of diminishing quality of life. A great non-fiction economics-oriented book on the US version of this is The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War by Robert Gordon. (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691147727/th...)
BytesAndGears | 2 years ago
Every recent generation has felt like they have it harder than their parents, and it is usually brushed off as just hindsight bias. But I feel like we don’t look at it enough that maybe things have actually gotten worse overall (for those of us in relatively rich countries).
I think a lot of things have gotten better in the last ~60 years, especially medicine, in terms of improving the lives of people. But some things, especially community related, have definitely gotten worse. And maybe those things are more important to our health than we’ve given credit to.
transcriptase | 2 years ago
wtfwhateven | 2 years ago
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.
jncfhnb | 2 years ago
> We’re conservative moms. This is how we raise our kids in a woke city
And
> the canceling of the American mind
And
> Climate protesters will never get people to change if they keep acting like this
Provocative right wing trash
lsy | 2 years ago
As can be expected, Haidt and the poster argue that solutions are found at the level of the cell phone and limiting access to it, rather than improvements at the social level where the boomer, gen x, and increasingly millennial generations continue to fail to deliver meaning through the aforementioned institutions.
If Gen Z could look to society and especially older generations for
- interpersonal relationships based on cooperation rather than competition
- work that was meaningfully compensated rather than exploitative
- governments that were responsive to their constituents rather than self-serving
- social support systems that reward rather than punish parenting, or
- religious institutions that delivered compassion and moral goodness rather than prejudice and contempt,
then I think it could be argued that folks could find meaning in these institutions instead of behind a phone screen. Until then the complaints about social decay are almost insulting.
vlunkr | 2 years ago
glitchc | 2 years ago
Ultimately people are looking for meaning and purpose to their existence. There are productive ways to get there, and then there are destructive ways. Everyone needs to pick their own path.
vore | 2 years ago
itsoktocry | 2 years ago
I agree this is a major problem, especially here in Canada.
But what makes you think these people will suddenly be satisified when they own a home or live on their own? It's more cost and more responsibility, and isn't automatically fulfilling in any special way, is it?
vore | 2 years ago
jrajav | 2 years ago
- 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.
gurchik | 2 years ago
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.
ryandrake | 2 years ago
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.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2 years ago
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!
glitchc | 2 years ago
As a millenial, things weren't that different for us. We had AoL, ICQ, MSN messenger. Folks played Quake, Starcraft, Everquest. WoW came out just as many of us entered university. Some of us flunked out because we gamed too much.
To Gen Z: Look, there are no substitutes for hard work and self control. If it's important, work at it. If it's bad for you, put it down. Delay isn't going to change anything. An 18 year old smoker is just as addicted as a 10 year old smoker.
We can make progress once people start taking responsibility for themselves.
solardev | 2 years ago
It starts out, off the bat, by reframing structural social issues as individual failures: it's mental illness, suicide, anxiety, cancel culture, coddling. Then it tries to make the point that phones enable this sort of collective doom-scrolling escapism.
Then it tries to present an actual anecdote from a Gen Z person to reinforce the viewpoint that liberal ideology (non-monogamy, shame about American issues, quiet-quitting, climate change, anti-religion) are the cause of this discontent... but then instead of addressing any of them, it tries again to reframe those issues as a personal addiction to smartphones. As if Gen Z would be happier simply by turning off their phones (which is probably true, granted, but doesn't really address any of the underlying social issues).
It's a weird strawman: Nevermind that the world is broken. You're just on your phone too much.
Then what happens after they turn it off? Still a shit economy, no good jobs unless you want to work in tech or finance (and even then...), climate change getting worse, nobody can afford housing, education is increasingly worthless, culture wars are getting more polarized...
I'd argue the opposite cause/effect: People are on their phones so much because that's all that's left to do in a dying world, because previous generations hoarded so much for themselves there's nothing left for the future.
itsoktocry | 2 years ago
You've missed and/or are proving the point.
Would it shock you to learn that there are large segments of the population who aren't in a doom loop of "the world is broken"?
solardev | 2 years ago
I_Am_Nous | 2 years ago
It doesn't go away if I don't read about it, but why subject myself to such needless anguish in the first place? Doomscrolling is a choice. Reading the news is a choice. Yes, this is my privilege speaking because I live in the middle of nowhere where nothing ever happens so I don't have to stay informed for my own safety. I choose to live somewhere with that level of safety cushion, and I give up all the "benefits" of living in the city for this privilege.
solardev | 2 years ago
Even if you turn off your phone, all those social issues making it hard for these generations will still be there, in a way that wasn't the same for our parents and grandparents. Even if you can't do anything about these, they still directly affect your livability and haunt your life in profound ways.
All the generational peers I know are basically separated into two groups: the tech people are fine (or better), and everyone else is struggling. Of the latter group, the better-off among us can rent alone or with a partner, maybe buy a cheap house in a rural area. The majority cannot.
And our predecessors' political and environmental failures compound every year to the point where they can't just be ignored even if we wanted to just hide, between wildfires and shootings and abortion and homophobia and transphobia... these have real everyday impacts to many of the people I know, even though none of them are doomscrollers. You can't just hide from the world and pretend like there are no issues when they're actively affecting you.
solatic | 2 years ago
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.
slowhadoken | 2 years ago
davesque | 2 years ago
Maybe the bigger problem is society's tolerance of mega companies that become so large that no one employee feels responsible for their abuses.
kotlip | 2 years ago
goodpaul6 | 2 years ago
I suspect that even BeReal will do this at some point unless they pivot to e.g. Cohost’s [1] model of paying a monthly fee.
Unfortunately achieving the network effects required for a successful social media app is at odds with the friction involved in paying for a subscription service. As such, “cool” apps like BeReal don’t stay cool for very long IMO.
[1] cohost.org
nunez | 2 years ago
- 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.
thefz | 2 years ago
ulizzle | 2 years ago
It’s this myth that gen z if the fist generation growing up with modern tech that goes unchallenged
I think it’s of more what the adults are teaching the kids that’s harming them. Ideological stuff, not tech.
NoGravitas | 2 years ago