Could it possibly be aggravated by the media telling us things that are obviously and immediately contradicted from what we see of raw, first person video accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube?
I think the problem denoted in the article is far larger than losing a trust in news media because of what people are seeing on a video. Thinking that CNN is full of crap doesn't make young and healthy people want to kill themselves, and that's where we are. Like the article said, we have a generation of people who are so lonely and depressed that 25% of them have thought seriously about suicide in the past 30 days. We're living in a death cult.
That's not to say that the loss of faith in institutions, especially the news, isn't a big deal, but personally I think this problem is 10 to 100 times bigger than that. It's an economic collapse, a pandemic, growing income inequality, climate change, the effect of technology on our minds, what we put into our bodies, and a thousand other things I can't even begin to name.
The more I read and think about the world today, the more I think that mental health is the problem of the 21st century, and that the previous list of issues is actually all secondary to the problem of mental health. There are enough resources and enough intelligence to solve all of those problems and more if we had the will.
>>>Like the article said, we have a generation of people who are so lonely and depressed that 25% of them have thought seriously about suicide in the past 30 days. We're living in a death cult.
Is that surprising when educators are pushing a deconstructionist approach to so many topics? Young people are just ending up confused and rudderless, and with the rise in single-parent households, kids aren't necessarily getting a comprehensive and emotionally-balanced upbringing either. I'd argue that a lot of this stuff will manifest as mental health issues, but those will be the symptoms, not the cause. The causes are failures to adequately train and mentor our youth, and that begins with how we are failing to train young adults to be parents.... partly because we're failing to hold them accountable for even basic "be an adult" responsibilities and an understanding of consequences to their actions.
To be honest, I'm not particularly familiar with how a deconstructionist approach to education works, so I won't vouch for or against it.
I do see the rise in single-parent households being an issue, but there's something confusing about that. I would expect kids to "act out" more if there was more psychological pressure on them, but the rates of things like teenage pregnancy and underage drinking is down over the past decade. This is in contrast to rates of depression increasing dramatically, even by 50% (around 8% to 13% in about a decade) in that exact age group (12-17).
Finally, as a young person myself, my (relatively recent) experience of highschool and being a teenager was quite the opposite - it's not that adults aren't holding them accountable, it's that they are holding themselves hyper-accountable. Both in the fact that they are comparing themselves to world-class performers on social media, and that there is now a permanent record of their social interactions online which can lead to politically correct woke mobs going after them. Being young in the US feels like walking on a tightrope while there's an earthquake going on.
>The causes are failures to adequately train and mentor our youth, and that begins with how we are failing to train young adults to be parents.... partly because we're failing to hold them accountable for even basic "be an adult" responsibilities and an understanding of consequences to their actions.
I think this statement is a bit vague. Could you elaborate what you think those responsibilities that are not correctly communicated are and how an adequate training would look?
Re: incorrectly communicated responsibilities, I'd look at helicopter and snowplow parents[1][2], and failing to enforce boundaries[3]. I'd also look at the characteristics listed for Gen Y in Tables 3&4, from[4]. For adequate training solutions, I'm mostly extrapolating from the parenting methods of my peers. They are all current or former military and with children aged 8-18. The guy with a "helicopter wife" is frustrated with his feckless, irresponsible 15yo daughter. The other guys seem to be getting far better results from their training and discipline methods, which are roughly:
1. Do a joint task (typically some household chore) with your child, and instruct them in how to perform it.
2. Assign them the task to execute independently.
3. Most importantly, hold them accountable when they fail. "No, I'm not going to break my neck to clean your clothes at the last minute. You were tasked with doing the laundry. You didn't. So now you can go to school and get teased by the other students for being nasty. Actions have consequences. Next time fulfill your responsibilities and successfully execute the task you were assigned. I'll provide remedial training if you don't understand the task, but I'm not going to do your work for you."
4. Help your children understand that the world is dangerous, no one owes you anything, and reckless actions have life-destroying consequences. Teach them how to do proper risk assessments. If you go backpacking in the hills of Morocco, with no security plan, you might get your head cut off. How are pairs of young white women not anticipating that?[5] If you verbally or physically assault law enforcement....you might end up in handcuffs or arrested. Yet we see people having total mental breakdowns when put in cuffs, as if it never occurred to them that a reaction was even a possible consequence of their belligerence. That complete failure to assess risk is how we end up with 31&32yo LAWYERS throwing firebombs at police cars....and subsequently facing 5-20 years in jail.[6] I think this point needs to build up #3 above, because your kids first need to learn their own role in their success/failure or happiness/suffering before you can work through courses of action/decision trees/risk assessments in various other real-life scenarios they might face as young adults.
5. "Train the trainer" mentality. As I am teaching you how to DO, I'm also teaching you how to TEACH. Be cognizant that our mentorship of our children should also give them mental models, anecdotes, and body language cues for how to train their own offspring. This is mostly applicable for the >22yo adult offspring, hopefully we haven't screwed up so bad that our kids are popping out babies much younger than that.
Do you think that's true of both sides? As a progressive, a lot of my frustration with "the other side" is that they seem to ignore what I'm seeing in the first person video accounts.
However, I'm wondering if people on the other side feel the same way about me.
One of the sources for "raw info" that I follow is the No Agenda Podcast (co-hosted by former MTV VJ and co-inventor or podcasting Adam Curry and former tech columnist John C. Dvorak). They position their podcast as "media deconstruction" and contrasting what the media say versus what is actually going on, and they slam Fox News every bit as much -- if not more -- as anyone else.
I'll tell you what gives me hope though: podcasts like the Joe Rogan Show where Joe, who is very progressive, will talk with ANYONE in order to discuss and understand differences. And this is one of the biggest weakness of mass media these days: if it cannot be condensed to a sound bite it's ignored. A thriving democracy is supposed to be a place where differing points of view are debated vigorously but with mutual respect between the parties debating. Unfortunately, these days it seems to be a race to get to the point where you can dehumanize your opponent, and this is a fault of both the left and right.
You ask who people on the other side think about you: I'm not a progressive but I don't think it's black and white either. I think we could probably agree on 80%+ of RELEVANT political issues... assuming we don't let a polarized media exaggerate what is actually relevant. We all want to be happy, we all want to be loved, we all want the next generation to prosper... I think that's universal.
Not sure how you get that Joe Rogan is a progressive?
He's probably more libertarian than progressive. He was quite open about his support for Ron Paul in the Obama-Romney election and then went for Gary Johnson in 2016. When Sen Sanders lost the nomination, he was quite open about saying he would vote for Trump over Biden.
He's very good friends with Alex Jones (of Sandy Hook denial infamy) and has hosted numerous other rightwing guests with a great degree of empathy for some of their positions.
Add to that his thoughts that perhaps "the Man" has had some grand conspiracies at work (e.g. him wondering if we really did land on the moon) and he's probably more identifiable as a liberal libertarian.
He definitely has a pleasant voice and can engage in conversations but I'm not sure how much some of the above-mentioned positions align with the majority of progressives.
> However, I'm wondering if people on the other side feel the same way about me.
Generally, identifying as <political label> usually involves ignoring the parts of reality that go against the narrative. Each group has a story, which is a simplification of a selection of real life, optimized to be viral (otherwise they would never have become a large group).
If you realize this:
- first, your former allies will denouce you as a traitor;
- then your former enemies will offer you membership, because it seems to them like you want to switch sides;
- you refuse, now both your former allies and your former enemies are angry at you;
- you spend some time alone;
- then you find people who are not playing the game, and they become your new friends;
- finally you realize that people not playing the game are actually a majority of the population.
Maybe those who identify as a truth seeker instead of as a progressive or a conservative find it easier to see what is happening in the world. Where do your first person video accounts come from? Are the edited? Are the missing content at the start or at the end that other first person video accounts include? Would your sources ever admit this or would you have to go to "the other side" to find the video in its entirety? Would you even know that the other side has a video with a more complete view of what happened? There are many ways to lie with video, lies of omission being quite common these days.
How does “truth seeker” help, say, with Teacher Unions supporting guillotines for Jeff Bezos?[0]
I think our epistemic agreements are gone, yes, but it feels like we’d be polarized today even with epistemic agreement.
It is true that Amazon has caused some bad things in the world, which has some factual basis, and we all might agree. But our ethics of eradication of obstacles to personal happiness has turned toxic.
Back then 'the media' was a thing. Walter Cronkite would come on TV and tell everybody what was going on, and you'd see some footage of some guys in Vietnam looking miserable and that was it. That level of political simplification isn't an option anymore. We're no longer hidden from the complexities festering beneath the surface of everything happening around us.
On the contrary, that level of political simplification is needed now more than ever. It didn't get more complex. It simply got noisier. The signal is lost, and people are flooded with information constantly - there is simply no way to verify truth. No one has the time to fact check the 100 tweets they saw today, or the 20 posts they saw on reddit, or the 30 pictures they saw on instagram.
My grandfather would watch italian news on RAI TV. The news there had an anchor. The show started with the anchor reading headlines. Then they went into each headline with more detail. Very limited ads. Straight, to the point. We need more of that.
I am pretty sure things back then were both similarly complex even though they appeared simple. Today, your FB feed is simple since it is auto-tuned to your beliefs.
I see no reason to believe that. What is an example where videos on social media contradict the news reporters? It does seem likely though that these videos on social media are showing media are showing one perspective that easily misleads people who then don't receive the context of the situation or view sfrom other angles that news media provides far better.
It’s probably not worthwhile discussing this particular case in HN, but it’s not rare for me to scroll my Facebook feed and see completely different interpretations of the same event.
>Why, in the world’s richest country, is every metric of mental health pathology rapidly worsening?
Simple. A lot of people are not having their needs met by "the system" while simultaneously feeling the resources are there to have their needs met.
People in third world countries seemingly deal much better in many ways in my experience. Although their needs aren't being met, they see no path to their needs being met, that just feels like reality to them.
People in the US who's needs aren't met have the thing they want thrown in their face to the point of absurdity constantly.
Robert Putnum has studied this extensively and was considered the domain expert until his results didn't match the ever changing requirements of adherence to political correctness. His work is still out there but even the linked article didn't bother to reference it. His data concluded the wrong thing so now it is to be shoved to the side so everyone can shrug their shoulders and pretend not to see what's at the heart of society's unravelling.
While very resonating and personal, I wish he had included data in comparison with the rest of the world. Data on where the US falls short, relatively, could give better insight into identifying the problems and getting to the solutions.
My general assumption these days is that, if an article portraying something as a uniquely American ill or failing hasn't bothered to put the stats it's using in context by comparing them with other countries, it's because those comparisons would get in the way of the article's thesis. Though maybe I'm getting cynical from having followed your media's coverage of Covid-19 over the past few months.
The US stopped being "government of the people, by the people, for the people" a long time ago. And the population is slowly waking up to that fact. I fear that the long term consequences will be seriously bad. As in "You ain't seen nothing yet."
