They were the primary bullies growing up? That's where I got the idea, at least. And suffering seems like a more authentic emotion than happiness, as there are all sorts of heavy social incentives to constantly project happiness. There's a lot more people out there faking happiness, than there are faking suffering.
I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger
Can you not downplay this? Some people might have a mild variation of a disorder but many, like myself, suffer deeply.
It could be a self fulfilling prophecy for some and if you add internet where a lot of people tend to make their diagnosis their whole life. My guess is that if you are feeling depressed it can be very comforting to talk with other people in the same state but I'm not sure how healthy it is in the long run if you spend a lot of time in such communities.
That said I think it is also a rougher way to grow up in many ways than it was for me. Your life might be hyper connected but I think for some that will only suck more when they are lonely outcasts and see everyone else's (appearance of) happy life on Instagram.
I don't think you are, but I'm wondering how this antidote comment is useful in a thread about suicide.
But, again, I'm a dumb happy adult that once almost jump in front of a bus because I was a dumb heart-broken twenty something. I know nothing.
I think this has always been the case. Isn't this what being emo, metal, punk, etc. was about in the early 2000s, 90s and 80s? Calling for attention is common at that age, and with so many and so intense feelings as one feels during teenage years, I have always assumed this is common.
> Kids "brag" about it on social media and sometimes discuss who is more miserable and make fun on people who are "wholesome" or "happy" as being shallow.
This sounds like punk subculture. And really a lot of other sub and counter-cultures. IMO this is also healthy. In the context of college I know people who went to schools where, they told me, the overarching social dynamic was "showing a put-together facade". They said this was very stressing. Not only would you struggle, but on top of that you'd have to hide it.
I went to a college where the overarching social dynamic was to complain and talk about how miserable we were, how much work we had, how stressed we all were, etc. It is very refreshing to not have to pretend you've got everything under control and to know that other people are struggling in the same way you are.
On that note, IMO it's worth having a look at wether it is in the other side of the coin that this problem resides— those "wholesome" kids. Especially in some areas of the US, kids are under immense amounts of pressure. Many times the people you'd less think are at risk of committing suicide are the ones who do [1].
It makes sense. If the middle-class keeps disappearing, this becomes an all-or-nothing game. Getting into a good college to study a lucrative career can sound like a ticket to a drastically better life. In the US you hear the word "success" a lot. If everyone around you is a high achiever in one monoculture, not fitting into that monoculture or not achieving the same things your community has can make you feel alone and inadequate. Here are some quotes from that article I linked [1]:
> A goofy basketball player with short brown hair and a pixie face, Cam, as he was known to friends, was the last kid anyone would have suspected of being troubled. His classmates describe him as having been happy, nonchalant, and popular, and that’s exactly how he appears in the homecoming photos posted on so many Facebook pages before his death: a handsome, grinning kid, standing smack in the center of his clique. “If you told me that someone in my friend group would commit suicide, he would be my straight-up last guess,” says Lisa Hao.
> “There’s no middle point for success. There’s no ‘I’m here and I’m happy with where I am.’ It’s always ‘I need to be up there,’” she says. The kids paint a picture of a sort of academic coliseum, where students look down their noses at peers in a lower math “lane,” guard their grade point averages like state secrets, brag about 2 a.m. cramming sessions, and consider a B a disaster.
> “Because we live in this extraordinary place that really has some singular qualities,” says Ken Dauber, a Palo Alto father and a member of the school board, “we think somehow that our kids are also singular and extraordinary. But they are just kids.”
[1]: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Why-are-Palo-Alto-s-k...
This mentality that success and maturity and health are evil is societal suicide.
It's a devil's bargain, because being at the receiving end of virtue signals is actually pretty worthless, unless maybe you get to be a diversity hire. However, if you foster a victim identity you will underachieve because you will blame everything and everyone but yourself when things go wrong.
In the past, males in particular would be told in no unclear terms that pretty much nobody cares to hear about their problems and that they need to sort themselves out as part of becoming adults.
Today, they'll be given pills and a consultation with therapists whose education is probably nonsense.
Not only do you not fit in, but you're not allowed to complain about anything/say anything, your problems don't matter, etc.
Which is pretty problematic for people who have issues that aren't in the "approved list of things that currently matter".
Basically, if you think will power is a limited resource, people will use that as an excuse to give up.
One of my fellow graduate students failed 2 out of 3 classes last semester. He's repeated that will power is finite several times, ignoring me when I mention research suggesting otherwise. It's just too convenient of an excuse for him to say it was beyond his control, he had no choice but to play board games all day instead of studying and doing homework.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976103847...
Psychology studies tend to be marred by the "piranha problem": you can't have a bunch of large effects determining behavior, without them eating each other.[1] We're immensely complicated, and make highly individual and nuanced decisions. There's just too much noise to try and boil things down to small patterns from simple studies.
I believe (perhaps grounded weakly in largely anecdotal evidence) that people need to be able to fit their own behavior in some sort of personal narrative, or justify it in some way. Therefore, that the belief they "can't help" but do something they want to do (whether that be procrastinate or eat unhealthy food) will make it easier to justify, and thus the behaviors more likely. But there are as many different internal narratives, built on life experiences, as there are people. Making it hard to generalize surface level consequences between people.
[1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/12/15/piranha-pr...
I guess even Nobel laureates aren't immune to the replication crisis...
""" My position when I wrote “Thinking, Fast and Slow” was that if a large body of evidence published in reputable journals supports an initially implausible conclusion, then scientific norms require us to believe that conclusion. Implausibility is not sufficient to justify disbelief, and belief in well-supported scientific conclusions is not optional. This position still seems reasonable to me – it is why I think people should believe in climate change. But the argument only holds when all relevant results are published.
I knew, of course, that the results of priming studies were based on small samples, that the effect sizes were perhaps implausibly large, and that no single study was conclusive on its own. What impressed me was the unanimity and coherence of the results reported by many laboratories. I concluded that priming effects are easy for skilled experimenters to induce, and that they are robust. However, I now understand that my reasoning was flawed and that I should have known better. Unanimity of underpowered studies provides compelling evidence for the existence of a severe file-drawer problem (and/or p-hacking). The argument is inescapable: Studies that are underpowered for the detection of plausible effects must occasionally return non-significant results even when the research hypothesis is true – the absence of these results is evidence that something is amiss in the published record. Furthermore, the existence of a substantial file-drawer effect undermines the two main tools that psychologists use to accumulate evidence for a broad hypotheses: meta-analysis and conceptual replication. Clearly, the experimental evidence for the ideas I presented in that chapter was significantly weaker than I believed when I wrote it. This was simply an error: I knew all I needed to know to moderate my enthusiasm for the surprising and elegant findings that I cited, but I did not think it through. When questions were later raised about the robustness of priming results I hoped that the authors of this research would rally to bolster their case by stronger evidence, but this did not happen. """ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/02/18/pizzagate-...
So he has made mistakes (we all do!), but tries his best to learn from them (which not all victims of the replication crisis do).
I'm not saying that they are faking it, and I know their lives look significantly shittier than mine at their age and the future looks bleak for most, but I have a theory that when it becomes viral some people try to act depressed and end up being depressed for real. Like, when I was adolescent I knew a lot of girls with eating disorders (bulimia/anorexia) in my immediate circle (before social media) but I don't think I know anybody with those problems today, because having those issues became uncool, now you have others to pick from.
So yes, what I'm trying to say is that I had paralyzing social anxiety before it was cool.