It’s the lack of perspective. There’s nothing to work or live towards.

I’m in my early thirties and grew up in the last years of the “it’s getting better” time, but nowadays it’s all gone.

The political system in all of the West is ossified and unable to solve any of the real problems. Society is dominated by a gerontocracy. The economy is fucked for almost all participants, except the very few at the very top.

My generation will not have better lives than our parents. And there’s absolutely no hope for it to become better . In fact, it’s likely getting way way worse for most of us.

Okay, but part of it is phones. Not in like, a ‘kids are always staring at their phones’ sense, but in terms of the ease of communication changing the social landscape.

When I was in my late teens and early 20s, if you wanted to go hang out with someone, you’d go downtown. You might run into the person you were looking for, you might run into someone completely different and have some crazy unexpected adventure, but it mostly happened in the same place. Even with old flip-phones, they facilitated communication but they didn’t derail or substitute it.

Want to see what someone’s doing now? You can immediately message them and either know they’re free or busy or that they’re not responding. And yeah, you could call somebody’s phone, but it was different. There was little incentive to keep a phone charged once you were off with your friends, and those early batteries did not last! I remember my mom giving me shit about never having a charge in my phone when she’d try to call me.

Every day was an unexpected adventure. Very little of it was planned beyond ‘go hang out in town’, but every day was something different. Once all my friends were on social media and carrying smart phones, it changed dramatically. I didn’t have to either go find someone or talk on the phone if I wanted to check in, I just have to message them. There’s no need to go have an adventure to just say ‘hey, what’s up?’. There’s no built-in incentive to team up and go find something to do the way there was when I had to physically get to someone to hang out.

And yeah, we can still make plans, but that’s different. ‘Plans’ were always there, just as something special and organized, but the default was just hanging around. I don’t feel that anymore in the same way. It’s still there, to some extent, because I see some younger folks hanging around, but not in the numbers we had. Plans require planning and come with some pressure that just seeing people around town never did.

I think that need to go out and run into random people in order to have a social experience gave us something that we’re missing now.

Also, like, we know a lot more now. We can see how screwed up humanity is. We know that a lot of our food is the direct result of dystopian sci-fi level torture of entire species. We know that the richest people are happy to light the world on fire to make a buck and that our measures for stopping them have so far not been as effective as we kind of need them to be. We know a lot of the horrible shit people have been doing to one another behind closed doors, and even out in the light of day.

We know a lot more about everything, but we haven’t really had the time to heal from it as a society or even really fully process it all, let alone change it. Given the limits of youthful autonomy until adulthood, it’s hardly surprising that it’s kinda distressing being stuck in the back seat of a car that’s careening toward a cliff while the previous generation’s driver mindlessly stares at a Facebook meme about kids be on their phones.

The whole thing is a mess, and younger people are right to be distressed about it. But technology and our struggle to adapt to it is part of that mess.

I don’t blame phones, but I do think big algorithm social media is partially to blame.

The problem is global and started in 2014. Student debt isn’t an issue in many countries.

Social media seems like the most obvious one to me, if you look at popularity graphs of the various sites it seems to line up pretty well.

Gen Z and A even have a term for it - “brain rot”. If you go down that rabbit hole of memes, it becomes obvious there’s a lot of self-doubt, confusion and angst among that generation, with weirdo influencers impacting their thinking in fairly deep ways.

To be fair, it’s also the phones.

The loss of 3rd places as you mentioned is huge. When I was a kid we at least had malls, where you could still hang out and roam about without having to actually buy anything. Nowadays, there’s next to nowhere to just exists without spending money (unless you live outside of cities/suburbs).

I believe that Mr. Galloway addresses most of the problems in his Ted Talk: How the US Is Destroying Young People’s Future | Scott Galloway | TED

Actually, the article didn’t say young people were doing worse. The reason that youth is no longer one of the “happiest times” is because the study showed that people only do better and better as they age. So where before your youth would be comparatively happier to your mid-life crisis, they’re saying we just get happier and happier into midlife and old age.

That sounds the same as it was for Millennials.

Don’t forget five to seven hours of homework a night.

“Opinion piece”? Did you read it?

my young adulthood was the happiest i had ever been; being middle aged sucks.

I’m planning on being one in another 20 years or so

That’s part of it, but the charts also show higher despair and lower satisfaction among younger people. For example:

It’s this thing that lots of money gets you.

Lol this dude sounds super out of touch. There are a whole lot of societal and economic factors around the '00s and '10s that are likely contributing.

Fuggin’ “cellphones” sounds like a typical boomer answer.

Also, there is likely some lag time between a population’s perception of traumatic or disturbing events and the onset of despair. I know that learning more about the financial crises around the late '00s did not help my mental health and only really occurred some time after in the mid '10s as people had time to analyze the root causes of these issues.

The continual deathmarch of climate change, growing awareness of the exploitation of the working class, and the reactionary violence and hate bred by right wing fanatics and politicians which surged beginning in the early '10s are all contenders for massive, culturally debilitating, trends. Lol “cellphones”.

Smart phones and social media are obviously amplifiers of these issues and are part of the problem, but the quote is remarkably reductive and does not address the root cause of what makes the information communicated through cell phones and social media so disheartening. Maybe we are given poor context for the quote and maybe it was something Blanchflower said in passing during the interview, but, still, not a good look.

Funny, no mention of late stage capitalism

I don’t know if people have just gotten meaner over time or if that is how it has always been, but there are a lot of people who are very unpleasant to interact with, both on and off the internet. It can be stressful trying to interact with new people because it’s a dice roll on whether they’re friendly or condescending.

Anyway, just my observation. I don’t know if that has anything to do with social media, but it wouldn’t surprise me I guess.

Yeah it’s the technological tool that’s the problem. Definitely not rising cost of living, political insanity, civil unrest, climate change, the slow stripping away of rights, war. But sure the problem is some nerd swiping up on their phone or playing video games or watching Netflix or literally any other distraction from hell world.

Big tech are absolutely evil pieces of shit beholden to the economic system that allows them to thrive to the detriment of humanity, but to blame a magic brick in your pocket like “yeah THIS, this must be why everyone is miserable (especially youth because please think of the children)” is just an incredibly narrow way of thinking, albeit a somewhat effective boogeyman, to distract from gestures broadly how badly we’ve fucked up and how much worse it’s getting as the century progresses.

That’s a profoundly ignorant perspective. Yeah, MAYBE cell phones play a role, but they’re hardly the only thing that’s changed about society.

• Ted Kaczinsky (The Unabomber)

He wasn’t wrong. He was just an asshole.

It is also the time in people’s lives where they have the most responsibility. Even if you’ve made the right choices in life, that’s when people are their busiest.