Kids These Days

One observation I made when I was a teacher was that the more we did to help students (as a cohort) with their mental health, the worse it became. My theory is that teenagers are experimenting with different identities, so when you give them a seminar on anxiety and depression, some of them try those on for size. Moral of the story: trying to pre-emptively solve a problem can cause the problem or cause a different problem.

I think one aspect that wasn’t discussed in this article sufficiently is:

> given that all of their peers have adopted it, there is a serious social cost to opting out.

Unlike reading a book, or fishing, or whatever, there’s no peer pressure to pick a specific hobby. There is significant pressure to use social media. I’m usually on the authors side, the view that the youth is rotten is literally as old as time (go check out Aristotle), but unlike a claimed moral decay, we are actively forcing kids to partake.

In Germany kids are drinking less than ever before. The education ministry went out and surveyed the kids: they don’t want to drink or party because they might embarrass themselves and it’ll be recorded and on social media and as such it might haunt them for the rest of their teen years. Albeit the outcome is good the enforcement mechanism is straight out of a 1984 horror novel kind of shit. As a teen you need to be able to experiment in a safe space somewhere somehow.

I feel like the same article could have written 30 years ago about smoking.

"Look, personally I'm all for smoking bans, so don't attack me, I just want to point out those studies that show that statistically, people in no-smoking areas have almost the same amount of respiratory symptoms as people in the regular areas. Maybe the real issue is our outdated idea of 'clean air'..."

When people talk about how much better off kids were in the past, I remember stories from my father (who went to school in the 1960's). They involved drugs, knives, and bombs. I had it pretty good in the 1980's.

This bit strikes me as rather stuck in the past and oblivious to 2026:

"the internet offers an escape from solitude for those rejected in the real world, allowing weirdos, nerds, and the painfully shy to make social connections in ways that would have been impossible for their counterparts in earlier decade."

That statement might have been true in 1995-2012 about forums, IRC, early social media, and Tumblr. It is not really true for the average young internet user today: the corporate platforms centered around phone apps seek to maximize engagement, not provide community.

It is a small number of people who will ever step outside the walled gardens and explore other spaces, but they might find even those other spaces unfulfilling as a sense of community. The fediverse has copied a lot of pathologies from corporate social media. Forums are ever fewer and with a graying demographic that won't necessary give a young person a feeling of connection with peers. Discord does offer some of the close-knitness of old-school IRC, but discoverability is a challenge.

> They have access to cheap travel, better food

What cheap travel? Better food compared to when? Most kids are obese eating poisoned food.

That was a great article, or maybe it was just a lot of gibberish that failed to say much of anything.

> but, given that all of their peers have adopted it, there is a serious social cost to opting out.

The same was true of smoking. A combination of gov regulation and social stigma have managed to reduce smoking rates.

Kids in europe walk from early to school and can drive by bisycle pretty far alone, without the police almost shoot parents for leaving children 1 hour alone outside.

a lot of attention given to phones, somewhat rightly so, but little to the rest of society. class -- can we think of any current events might lead to children being despondent about their future? anything at all going on in the world?

Saying that teenage pregnancy, rape, suicide and alcohol abuse were not serious problems in 1940 is some serious head-in-sand thinking.

> My friend Frank Keil has a terrific new book out (buy it here), in which, among many other things, he mourns the loss of tinkering. Children and teenagers used to take things apart and put them back together again—toasters, bicycles, and especially cars. Keil argues that the decline of tinkering has had profound consequences for children and adolescents’ understanding of the world.

It is somewhat sad that things have gradually become more un-tinkerable. What used to be a bunch of large components over a large circuit board, or maybe even a mechanical system is now a tiny chip with literally no way to tell anything about it when you disassemble it.

On the other hand, there's far, far more resources for dedicated tinkering these days. $5 microcontrollers and electronics kits 20 years ago? Not a thing. Internet guides you can follow to master it all? Good luck with books that are too hard for you to start reading without a mentor or a school. Learning tinkering has never been easier, but people's motivation for it has never been lower either.

> Teenagers drink less, smoke less, and are less likely to die in car accidents.

Why would he put "drink less" is reasons why teens should be happier?

[dead]

That was a lot of empty-headed complaining punctuated with screenshots from reddit.