Reality for kids seems so much more competitive and ruthless in every way. And there are so few resources available to them to help them deal with it.
At the same time opportunities are shrinking and pressure to perform is increasing. It's not enough to be adequate, you have to be outstanding in looks, talent, ability, work ethic, party ethic, lifestyle, income, and education.
But you can't be. Because you're not competing with a small group of relative peers, you're competing with the entire online world.
At the same time there's incoming doom in the form of climate change, Covid mismanagement, outrageous and crippling economic inequality, various wars, and now the threat of AI.
It would be strange if kids weren't getting depressed under these circumstances.
When I was a kid you went to whatever school was in your neighborhood. On the other hand, when i was a kid my parents had no idea what a good school event meant.
It's actually even worse than that: you're competing separately in each field, in parallel. But you only see the others in the context of that which they are good at, which is why you see them in that space in the first place.
Dr Varshavski can project charisma but i don’t know how well that translates in one on one interactions as his patient. He also doesn’t really seem to be at the top of his field in knowledge and skill, maybe in bedside manners.
Probably the icing on the cake for me, looking like no job prospect and potential for serious consequences ranging from mass scale disinformation to extinction.
We need to get our priorities straight as a species.
I believe a large amount of the negative effects is that people take themselves too seriously. Every quote on social media is put on the scale and becoming a pariah is basically random. The haunting is mostly done by people with a lack of self-worth and confidence themselves.
But some values also changed for the worse in my opinion. Confidence is valued much more than humility and seen as leadership material. I don't believe it prudent to encourage people that actually do look for strong figures out of fear.
The movie Red Dawn was the ultimate manifestation of 80's red hysteria and triumphal American exceptionalism.
~625 scanlines (PAL)? We only had ~480 scan lines with NTSC.
My parents had a roof-mounted VHF/UHF antenna that could be electrically rotated with a dial. Looking something like this
Antenna:
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
Channel Master:
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/WXgAAOSwGJJfoJlz/s-l640.jpg
My grandparents had an analog HBO pirate cheat box with a fixed, directional antenna. I remember watching George Carlin standup specials.
This is so out of touch. You might as well be using the "It's the video games!" excuse of yore.
Teenagers and those in their 20s see what their parents were able to do. They hear what their parents bought their house for, they know about their pensions, they see that their parents could afford raising a child into their teens, they find out that college was actually affordable. They know that's now all out of reach.
Some even see their parents struggling, and know it's going to be much much worse for them.
You all really think this is about influencers?
I think you're on target about the discouraging aspects of being visibly worse off than your parents' generation, and I think that millennials have that problem as well.
The situation is likely to get worse as AI-fueled productivity increases are unlikely to improve wages either.
But parent comment abv has a point teaching is a big factor here. And teaching in the current environment has become much more complex.
There is endless over stimulation and distraction which ruins environments where learning is possible. And secondly information has exploding. Kids can easily get overwhelmed just looking at a Wikipedia article. Teachers have a very hard job keeping things on track.
She does, however, uncritically ingest way too much TikTok shit.
Has this specter gone away?
All of those issues felt less existential (or at least had very clear points of no return that we managed to avoid going over the brink on), and climate change for many, maybe quite reasonably so, feels like we will be the proverbial boiling frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
It feels different because of the complexity and scale is no longer definable or predicated on a clear discrete set of objects (e.g. Nuclear powers, key banking systems, a hot war with defined participants) but is by global definition....everything.
It's abstract yet ever present (e.g. all the recent climate weirdness, and the disasters that have followed, both in terms of pure environmental impacts as well as economic and overall regional stability as byproducts thereof) and that becomes much more difficult to "manage"
I think it's social media, that's what's really changed: Every single teenager is now comparing themselves against every other kid in the world instead of just their local peers (and maybe a few grainy MTV stars over 525 scan lines). And of course the "popular" ones they're comparing to are the most successful, most good-looking, most privileged i.e. the most "perfect" ones (because that's how they got to be the most popular). It's a terrible yardstick for anyone to measure themselves against, let along impressionable young minds.