Fascinating results. Another study that may be useful is, rather than approach reduction of social media time on an individual basis, approach it from a group dynamic.
What I mean is, rather than having one kid get off of it, have groups of friends get off it and see what the results are.
I would hypothesize this would have a sort of negative network effect, where if a kid knew that not only he was off it, but his 2-3 bffs were as well, it would improve his mental state to a greater degree than cutting the preverbal cord alone, because there would be no little FOMO voice whispering in his ear.
Personally, I have told my wife and kids there will be no social media of any type until they are 18, period. And that is a hill I will die on. You know my wife will be getting this post sent to her.
I'm impressed with your ability to change your mind, and as a result of reading this am now wondering if wokeness itself is more a downstream effect of social media poisoning than I'd thought.
Hanania stays on my radar precisely because he's unafraid to go against the grain and willing to update his beliefs. An annoyingly rare quality among public intellectuals.
I was typing on my phone and didn't flesh out the skeletal comment -- my suspicion is that the peculiarities of social-media-augmented mental illness makes young people even more (and even faster, with tighter feedback loops) prone to go in for these same old tired attacks (goes back much further than the 60s, but I'm sure you know that). I'm just old enough to remember how everything has been getting worse and crazier even before the smartphone, and I mostly think about culture-war stuff being pushed by big media outlets -- what felt novel to me was the idea of how social media doesn't merely boost narratives but creates the discontent necessary for their flourishing.
I think social media certainly helps bad ideas spread faster, but I'm not sure it's clear that there is any kind of unique interaction with woke ideology in particular. There are plenty of other things that you will find people online blaming their misery for, if you know which corners to look in. My theory is that woke predominates because it is the official narrative of power. If the official narrative of power was to blame something else instead of blaming straight white cis conservative white men and the like, it's possible social media would just amplify that message instead.
Yes you're describing the default position, which I accepted without thinking about it until writing in this thread. But let's think further.
If we can generalize for a moment, we can summarize wokeness as hating everything traditional, masculine, white, intelligent, disciplined, strong, courageous, and meritocratic. To further generalize, sitting around on a phone all day makes people modern, effeminate, deracinated, stupid, lazy, weak, cowardly, and prone to giving up.
If the official narrative of power were anti-woke to the maximal extent, giving a child or a woman a smartphone would be punishable by death.
Well yes, if we define woke as allowing social media use and not-woke as disallowing it, of course the former ideology leaves one more vulnerable to its effects. I was thinking more within the assumption that someone is already allowed to use social media and uses it frequently. Believe it or not, hating women and sitting on the computer all day are not at all mutually exclusive things. Behold the "incel" community if you think otherwise.
Ah, I see the misapprehension under which you're laboring. No, 'hating women' isn't traditional -- people who role-play as 'trad' online are also modern, weak, etc., and believe that having a negative reaction to wokeness is the same thing as being usefully anti-woke. Playing the 'heel' in the same ring as the hero isn't a meaningful protest against professional wrestling.
You could argue it goes a little further than that, back to Marcuse and the Frankfurters (also Gramsci, Reich, and other “neo-Marxists” or “cultural Marxists” of the ‘20s and ‘30s)
Interesting post. The section about cross-national data got me thinking, though. I wonder how much of this overall mental well being doesn’t come directly from using social media per se but rather from the constant focus on mental health on many profiles on these social media.
Why I mention that?
I moved from Poland to Ireland in 2017 and then to the US in 2020. I would rate my mental well being as being the same or maybe even better now than 6 years ago. But at the same time, the amount of focus on mental health in both Ireland and the US (compared to Poland) had me wonder multiple times if maybe I’m actually in need of therapy? Maybe I’m just not aware of how bad my mental health is? After all, all these studies ask about subjective feelings.
What I’m trying to say is that people in Poland use social media way more than people in the US, at least in my millennial age cohort. During the pandemic, all of my American friends were posting about taking care of your mental health while most of my Polish friends were posting photos from walks in the park or grocery trips in full gear. But no one I know goes to therapy in Poland while on the American Facebook every second ad I see is from Betterhelp and everyone I know here actually goes to therapy or at least have some sort of a mental health help app. The mere fact that most people in the US would know what Betterhelp is tells something about the Western obsession with mental health.
It’s the same with other mental issues. For example, before I moved to the US I never considered I might have ADHD. But everyone here is diagnosed with one, because Aderall is a miracle drug that gets you through college, and I too wondered maybe I have ADHD given that it’s hard for me to focus sometimes. But of course I don’t have ADHD, it’s just that that the marketing machine is so strong. And you can see it in data, where the percentage of kids with “diagnosed” ADHD is skyrocketing.
I also believe this kind of navel gazing is unhealthy. The question is whether it is a cause or an effect. I remember the US being obsessed with mental health, disagnosing kids with all kinds of disorders, hysteria about bulimia, talk of girls being shown unrealistic bodies in fashion magazines, etc when I was growing up in the 1990s. So maybe people talk more about mental health now because they’re crazier. This stuff has been part of the culture for a while.
I agree, it is part of our culture and has been for a very long time. With mental health, as with many other things, we have a tendency to go to extremes in our zeal, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. I think our tendency to focus on MH has been increasingly amplified not just due to media, but also the near total commodification and medicalization of MH. My sense is that the scope of the "mental health field" has been gradually expanding to include not just serious psychiatric illness, but nearly all forms of human mental suffering which were once attended to by other, non-medical institutions. A non-trivial amount of what is reported as "depression" these days is really a kind of existential dislocation that is clearly related to all the societal changes we're seeing. This isn't to downgrade that form of unhappiness by saying it is not necessarily "depression", but rather that not all human unhappiness is the same, and they don't necessarily call for the same treatments. SSRIs can be helpful for some things, but I rarely see them help a miserable teenager whose basic problem is being online 24 hours a day. The prescription in that case is obviously to be online much less, especially the more toxic forms of social media.
To me its clear that wokeness is the main culprit, though you've made your case that social media does have an effect. As Yglesias points out, liberal boys are more depressed than conservative girls! If you've been on Facebook you'll know conservatives are on social media too. So are men, and so are heterosexuals.
The international data supports this hypothesis, with a small increase in non-Anglo countries, a larger increase in Anglo countries, and the biggest increase in the US.
Overall, it's clear social media is causing a small increase in depression, especially among girls. But being liberal (specifically Anglo-style woke) is a much larger risk factor, which causes liberal boys to be more depressed than conservative girls, and for LGBT-indentifying youth (the wokest group of people in the world) to have sky-high (>70%) rates of severe depression.
It could be the other way around: being depressed makes people turn to wokeness, since wokeness offers a way to blame your problems on someone else. This is especially true for young women that can now blame everything on the patriarchy.
While I think leftism is poison for the brain and soul, the words everyone is saying don't match Yglesias' graph. According to it, leftists of both sexes have always been more depressed than rightists of both sexes. Nothing changed there. Leftist boys, rightist boys, and rightist girls moved up basically in parallel starting around 2011-2014. It's just that leftist girls broke out into a depressive class of their own.
If I go off of what I've observed of middle school and HS both personally and more recently from afar, the main reason leftist teens are more depressed than rightist teens in every age is that the leftists tend to be drama kids, goth, punk, etc. (Woke being different in some ways but in other ways just the latest iteration), which involves adopting a subculture that revels in and reinforces misery. Rightist teens tend to be jocks/normies which means pursuing things that make them happy and probably getting more exercise and time outside.
But meanwhile something, or multiple things, made ALL TEENS more prone to depression starting around Obama's second term but hit leftist girls (NOT leftist boys) disproportionately.
A causal effect of 0.1 standard deviations is pretty meaningful. It corresponds to a correlation coefficient of 0.07, which might seem small but is in fact similar to the relationship between childhood lead exposure and adult IQ. https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Haidt%20Testimony.pdf
"the point is that breastfeeding is inconvenient and often hurts pretty badly"
There genuinely is something missing from your brain. Women enjoy breastfeeding, a lot, and it also helps them lose weight. Yes, it takes a bit of practice to get good at it, like anything else worth doing, but a week or two usually does it. Conversely, feeding with a bottle is boring and lame. And bottle feeding inevitably leads to the father being asked to do it, which is revolting.
Yes, pumping is also extremely cringe, but your conclusion does not follow. Women should arrange their lives, or have them arranged by their husband, so as to be able to breastfeed when the baby requires it. In part this means following what are today considered liberal mores (i.e. allowing breastfeeding suitably covered in public places) but mostly it means following hyper-conservative mores.
Pumping is based on the belief that the superiority of breastfeeding is a function solely of the superiority of breastmilk. It's an attempt to acknowledge our biological nature, while not really acknowledging it. The reason breastfeeding is superior is because we are mammals and that is what mammals do. In fact, I would say that any study which groups pumpers and breastfeeders together is worthless and this is likely the cause of ambiguity on whether breastfeeding is better.
Phones are merely the delivery channel for woke poison. In a different time and place the same phones might be delivery channels for positive constructive content.
I'm not sure it's this simple: in some of these studies, satisfaction was decreasing before wokeness became the gargantuan cultural force it is today. Also, depending on how you use Facebook (or other social networks) you might well find yourself siloed in (for example) a right-wing echo chamber, or a fitness one, or a beauty one. In my experience only YouTube overtly pushes woke stuff at you against your telling it to not to, and even then it's a single click to avoid it.
My suspicion is that it's instead the comparison problem, that social media immediately shows you the most beautiful, or the most fit, or the most talented, or the most virtuoso, or whatever it might be. For every person who can take that as inspiration, I'd wager there are dozens who take it as a message that they can't compete.
I'm not saying the woke stuff helps, but I don't see it as the major, single factor, rather one among many.
This is a great summary of what we consider to be traditional social media, which consists of people posting things about themselves and others. Obviously, this has ravaged teenage girls' mental health. Where the negative affects on teenage boys come into play are object-based social media (watching other people do something specific). The biggest Youtubers are people who film themselves playing video games. It's hilarious when I look at what my nephews watch on Youtube and think "what is this nonsense" and then notice the channel has 57 million subscribers.
While boys don't have it as bad on regular social media, there are a lot of smart teenage boys who aren't necessarily depressed but by all measures have checked out of the real world. I know a few teachers who are dealing with boys who just won't do any schoolwork and can't stay awake in class. When they tell the parents, they throw up their hands and say it's because they play video games from the second they get home at 3pm until they pass out at 2am. I'm not a parent yet, but you have to be willing to draw a line somewhere.
In Haidt's writing, he argues out that the boy stuff isn't as bad because for boys, online gaming remains an outlet for healthy competition (even if it's not as healthy as sports), while for girls, it's an outlet for the female tendency to "compare and despair". My college was an early adopter of Facebook in the mid 00s, and I remember the instant it was available, my college girlfriend used it exclusively to despair over ways that other girls had it better than her.
But Twitch and a lot of YouTube gamer content strikes me as a substitute for what I did growing up (also an Old Millennial, and a big gamer at the time), which was hanging out with friends and playing NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, and N64. Which, to be sure, wasn't the best use of time, but it was undeniably SOCIAL, and most of my time spent playing video games was with a friend. The Twitch gamer is a substitute gamer friend, bantering with you the same way we used to banter, but he's a creepy facsimile of an actual bantering gamer friend.
My kids are young, but for as long as possible, the way I'm approaching screen time with them is to insist that it's a social activity. We have family movie nights or TV time, and we have family game time. When they get older, maybe they'll have friends over to game or watch movies. But they don't get to sit there, off in their own world, and game or watch YouTube. If you don't like what's on the family TV, you can open a book, but you can't open another screen.
I don’t find it hard to believe that something that increases competition in zero-sum status games has a net negative effect on mental health. Or as Houellebecq calls it, „extension de la domaine de lutte“.
>I tend to dislike moral panics that are used to justify government intervention in people’s personal choices or market forces, particularly of the “think of the children” variety.<
While this is an understandable sentiment, it bears mentioning that we do in fact tend to disregard personal choice or market forces when it comes to minors, and with good reason. If little Timmy wants to have candy for dinner every night and mommy says no, we tend to side with mommy. The comparison to drugs/alcohol is very good here. Nearly everyone understands that minors' access to these substances should be restricted despite whatever markets might try and do to supply them, even people who are otherwise heavily pro-market.
>the fact that the most liberal demographics, that is women and LGBT adolescents, are having the most mental problems indicates that there is something to the theory that wokeness causes misery.<
One thought I have on this point is that social isolation is likely to be more devastating to women than men, as women tend to be more interested in other people, by comparison to men who are more likely to be content sitting in their basement playing video games and less interested in scrolling endlessly through facebook status updates. This is potentially supported by the fact that, IIRC, women use social media more frequently than men and are overall more interested in it (though I certainly do not have the time nor the interest to do a deep dive on that particular question like you have here).
I should add that, of course, I also do believe wokeness causes misery. Both can be true at the same time.
My last remark is that another trend I would point to is the destruction of social institutions under the encroachment of the all-powerful state, which is itself another symptom of wokeness. In the past, young people could meet other young people who shared their interests and identities through associations such as church, school clubs, Boy Scouts, et cetera., with church in particular being a big one. All of these have been hollowed out by wokeness and, to the extent that they still exist, are often turned to politics and made to serve as a vehicle for more wokeness, which subverts their actual intended original function of providing a framework for healthy social association. And with COVID even physical attendance of schools was taken away.
Having been a young person myself once, I can recall with some level of confidence that young people do not know how to properly associate with others, and have to be socialized by adults who provide them with proper guidelines and environments in which to practice being social. But if the adults do not provide any such guidelines or environments, or worse yet actively discourage the young people from leaving the house, then the youngsters will naturally wither in isolation with predictable consequences for their social lives upon reaching adulthood.
How has wokeness destroyed social institutions? Putnam wrote Bowling Alone in 1995, and I have seen zero evidence that joining social institutions has significantly decreased recently compared to the long-term trend.
Wokeness is certainly not the *only* factor, but I do believe it is a major one. As Richard has written about before, what we call "wokeness" today started all the way back with the Civil Rights movement and the end of freedom of association. Secular leftism has done a huge number on the church, which previously served as a universal social institution that everyone could participate in with accompanying well-defined and healthy (or at least much healthier compared to woke) behavioral norms.
Except that religious affiliation is much higher in the US then it is in the rest of the developed world, where religious participation and belief declined much earlier than in the US. Also, as was described in Bowling Alone, it's not that Boomers were abnormally unlikely to join associations, it was that the Greatest Generation was abnormally likely to join them. To blame this on wokeism you either need a correlation or causal mechanism and I don't see either. I would also point out that religious participation is declining among the conservative population, so are they also becoming woke?
My view stems in large part from wondering what I would have people actually do with their kids in order to get them out of the house and off of the phone. Church activities are the first thing to come to mind as practically ready-made for the purpose. If you want to propose better options, I'd be curious to hear them, though again they would need to have a solid mechanism for keeping woke out so that parents aren't sending little Timmy off to be taught about the Gender Unicorn and such.
>I would also point out that religious participation is declining among the conservative population, so are they also becoming woke?<
I mean, the answer is quite clearly yes. Many conservatives these days, possibly even most, are hesitant to condemn gay marriage, for instance. That's pretty woke compared to like, the distant past of 10-15 years ago. I think the entire political history of the nation post-WWII could be pretty fairly described as liberals dragging conservatives along in the wake of their quest to move ever leftward. Today's conservative may be unwoke compared to today's liberals, but he can be pretty woke compared to himself 20 years ago, and definitely compared to 40-50 years ago.
Hanania, you may have gotten your cause and effect flipped around vis-a-vis teenaged misery and wokeness (at least before your delve into social media as a root cause). It's not that misery causes wokeness in young people; rather, already miserable youth gravitate towards wokeness. It is either a hopeless ideology (in the case of its White followers), where you're meant to strive for a lifetime to lessen your own fortunes and the fortunes of your kin with no hope of personal reward except maybe some residual alleviation of your burning conscience, or it's an ideology of angst and resentment (in the case of its poc practitioners). Neither of these mindsets are found in mentally healthy people. Consider that the greatest grassroots explosion of wokeness occurred in the summer of 2020, when the youngest generations in the Western World were already collectively at arguably their most miserable point. Lockdowns for months, everyone's granny dying: people were suffering from cabin fever, and no small amount of fear and uncertainty over the future. Oh, and they had been left with nothing to do but patrol their social media accounts, as you mentioned in your article.
I'd be more inclined to think that being miserable makes you liberal. For example, I could imagine that gays alone explain the gap between liberal boys and conservative girls (gays are more depressed).
Fascinating results. Another study that may be useful is, rather than approach reduction of social media time on an individual basis, approach it from a group dynamic.
What I mean is, rather than having one kid get off of it, have groups of friends get off it and see what the results are.
I would hypothesize this would have a sort of negative network effect, where if a kid knew that not only he was off it, but his 2-3 bffs were as well, it would improve his mental state to a greater degree than cutting the preverbal cord alone, because there would be no little FOMO voice whispering in his ear.
Personally, I have told my wife and kids there will be no social media of any type until they are 18, period. And that is a hill I will die on. You know my wife will be getting this post sent to her.
Thanks Richard.
I'm impressed with your ability to change your mind, and as a result of reading this am now wondering if wokeness itself is more a downstream effect of social media poisoning than I'd thought.
Hanania stays on my radar precisely because he's unafraid to go against the grain and willing to update his beliefs. An annoyingly rare quality among public intellectuals.
I was typing on my phone and didn't flesh out the skeletal comment -- my suspicion is that the peculiarities of social-media-augmented mental illness makes young people even more (and even faster, with tighter feedback loops) prone to go in for these same old tired attacks (goes back much further than the 60s, but I'm sure you know that). I'm just old enough to remember how everything has been getting worse and crazier even before the smartphone, and I mostly think about culture-war stuff being pushed by big media outlets -- what felt novel to me was the idea of how social media doesn't merely boost narratives but creates the discontent necessary for their flourishing.
I think social media certainly helps bad ideas spread faster, but I'm not sure it's clear that there is any kind of unique interaction with woke ideology in particular. There are plenty of other things that you will find people online blaming their misery for, if you know which corners to look in. My theory is that woke predominates because it is the official narrative of power. If the official narrative of power was to blame something else instead of blaming straight white cis conservative white men and the like, it's possible social media would just amplify that message instead.
Yes you're describing the default position, which I accepted without thinking about it until writing in this thread. But let's think further.
If we can generalize for a moment, we can summarize wokeness as hating everything traditional, masculine, white, intelligent, disciplined, strong, courageous, and meritocratic. To further generalize, sitting around on a phone all day makes people modern, effeminate, deracinated, stupid, lazy, weak, cowardly, and prone to giving up.
If the official narrative of power were anti-woke to the maximal extent, giving a child or a woman a smartphone would be punishable by death.
Who the hell taught you that definiiton, Leo? That came straight out of victim-minded FOX Gnus propaganda. You've been played.
Nice hallucination, pal.
Well yes, if we define woke as allowing social media use and not-woke as disallowing it, of course the former ideology leaves one more vulnerable to its effects. I was thinking more within the assumption that someone is already allowed to use social media and uses it frequently. Believe it or not, hating women and sitting on the computer all day are not at all mutually exclusive things. Behold the "incel" community if you think otherwise.
Ah, I see the misapprehension under which you're laboring. No, 'hating women' isn't traditional -- people who role-play as 'trad' online are also modern, weak, etc., and believe that having a negative reaction to wokeness is the same thing as being usefully anti-woke. Playing the 'heel' in the same ring as the hero isn't a meaningful protest against professional wrestling.
You could argue it goes a little further than that, back to Marcuse and the Frankfurters (also Gramsci, Reich, and other “neo-Marxists” or “cultural Marxists” of the ‘20s and ‘30s)
Interesting post. The section about cross-national data got me thinking, though. I wonder how much of this overall mental well being doesn’t come directly from using social media per se but rather from the constant focus on mental health on many profiles on these social media.
Why I mention that?
I moved from Poland to Ireland in 2017 and then to the US in 2020. I would rate my mental well being as being the same or maybe even better now than 6 years ago. But at the same time, the amount of focus on mental health in both Ireland and the US (compared to Poland) had me wonder multiple times if maybe I’m actually in need of therapy? Maybe I’m just not aware of how bad my mental health is? After all, all these studies ask about subjective feelings.
What I’m trying to say is that people in Poland use social media way more than people in the US, at least in my millennial age cohort. During the pandemic, all of my American friends were posting about taking care of your mental health while most of my Polish friends were posting photos from walks in the park or grocery trips in full gear. But no one I know goes to therapy in Poland while on the American Facebook every second ad I see is from Betterhelp and everyone I know here actually goes to therapy or at least have some sort of a mental health help app. The mere fact that most people in the US would know what Betterhelp is tells something about the Western obsession with mental health.
It’s the same with other mental issues. For example, before I moved to the US I never considered I might have ADHD. But everyone here is diagnosed with one, because Aderall is a miracle drug that gets you through college, and I too wondered maybe I have ADHD given that it’s hard for me to focus sometimes. But of course I don’t have ADHD, it’s just that that the marketing machine is so strong. And you can see it in data, where the percentage of kids with “diagnosed” ADHD is skyrocketing.
I also believe this kind of navel gazing is unhealthy. The question is whether it is a cause or an effect. I remember the US being obsessed with mental health, disagnosing kids with all kinds of disorders, hysteria about bulimia, talk of girls being shown unrealistic bodies in fashion magazines, etc when I was growing up in the 1990s. So maybe people talk more about mental health now because they’re crazier. This stuff has been part of the culture for a while.
I agree, it is part of our culture and has been for a very long time. With mental health, as with many other things, we have a tendency to go to extremes in our zeal, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. I think our tendency to focus on MH has been increasingly amplified not just due to media, but also the near total commodification and medicalization of MH. My sense is that the scope of the "mental health field" has been gradually expanding to include not just serious psychiatric illness, but nearly all forms of human mental suffering which were once attended to by other, non-medical institutions. A non-trivial amount of what is reported as "depression" these days is really a kind of existential dislocation that is clearly related to all the societal changes we're seeing. This isn't to downgrade that form of unhappiness by saying it is not necessarily "depression", but rather that not all human unhappiness is the same, and they don't necessarily call for the same treatments. SSRIs can be helpful for some things, but I rarely see them help a miserable teenager whose basic problem is being online 24 hours a day. The prescription in that case is obviously to be online much less, especially the more toxic forms of social media.
So true. Social media seems to be more of a *vehicle* for the problem, not a root cause.
To me its clear that wokeness is the main culprit, though you've made your case that social media does have an effect. As Yglesias points out, liberal boys are more depressed than conservative girls! If you've been on Facebook you'll know conservatives are on social media too. So are men, and so are heterosexuals.
The international data supports this hypothesis, with a small increase in non-Anglo countries, a larger increase in Anglo countries, and the biggest increase in the US.
Overall, it's clear social media is causing a small increase in depression, especially among girls. But being liberal (specifically Anglo-style woke) is a much larger risk factor, which causes liberal boys to be more depressed than conservative girls, and for LGBT-indentifying youth (the wokest group of people in the world) to have sky-high (>70%) rates of severe depression.
It could be the other way around: being depressed makes people turn to wokeness, since wokeness offers a way to blame your problems on someone else. This is especially true for young women that can now blame everything on the patriarchy.
I agree, the causation goes both ways. It's likely a vicious feedback loop.
While I think leftism is poison for the brain and soul, the words everyone is saying don't match Yglesias' graph. According to it, leftists of both sexes have always been more depressed than rightists of both sexes. Nothing changed there. Leftist boys, rightist boys, and rightist girls moved up basically in parallel starting around 2011-2014. It's just that leftist girls broke out into a depressive class of their own.
If I go off of what I've observed of middle school and HS both personally and more recently from afar, the main reason leftist teens are more depressed than rightist teens in every age is that the leftists tend to be drama kids, goth, punk, etc. (Woke being different in some ways but in other ways just the latest iteration), which involves adopting a subculture that revels in and reinforces misery. Rightist teens tend to be jocks/normies which means pursuing things that make them happy and probably getting more exercise and time outside.
But meanwhile something, or multiple things, made ALL TEENS more prone to depression starting around Obama's second term but hit leftist girls (NOT leftist boys) disproportionately.
Appreciate the clarity
But Yglesias shows that it's also going up for conservatives. So something is causing the increase regardless.
Maybe social media! But liberal boys being more depressed than conservative girls indicates that wokeness has a larger effect.
Both/and not either/or?
A causal effect of 0.1 standard deviations is pretty meaningful. It corresponds to a correlation coefficient of 0.07, which might seem small but is in fact similar to the relationship between childhood lead exposure and adult IQ. https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Haidt%20Testimony.pdf
A somewhat higher correlation of 0.17 would, if causal, fully explain the 50% rise in teen girl depression. https://chris-said.io/2022/05/10/social-media-and-teen-depression/
"the point is that breastfeeding is inconvenient and often hurts pretty badly"
There genuinely is something missing from your brain. Women enjoy breastfeeding, a lot, and it also helps them lose weight. Yes, it takes a bit of practice to get good at it, like anything else worth doing, but a week or two usually does it. Conversely, feeding with a bottle is boring and lame. And bottle feeding inevitably leads to the father being asked to do it, which is revolting.
Yes, pumping is also extremely cringe, but your conclusion does not follow. Women should arrange their lives, or have them arranged by their husband, so as to be able to breastfeed when the baby requires it. In part this means following what are today considered liberal mores (i.e. allowing breastfeeding suitably covered in public places) but mostly it means following hyper-conservative mores.
Pumping is based on the belief that the superiority of breastfeeding is a function solely of the superiority of breastmilk. It's an attempt to acknowledge our biological nature, while not really acknowledging it. The reason breastfeeding is superior is because we are mammals and that is what mammals do. In fact, I would say that any study which groups pumpers and breastfeeders together is worthless and this is likely the cause of ambiguity on whether breastfeeding is better.
Phones are merely the delivery channel for woke poison. In a different time and place the same phones might be delivery channels for positive constructive content.
I'm not sure it's this simple: in some of these studies, satisfaction was decreasing before wokeness became the gargantuan cultural force it is today. Also, depending on how you use Facebook (or other social networks) you might well find yourself siloed in (for example) a right-wing echo chamber, or a fitness one, or a beauty one. In my experience only YouTube overtly pushes woke stuff at you against your telling it to not to, and even then it's a single click to avoid it.
My suspicion is that it's instead the comparison problem, that social media immediately shows you the most beautiful, or the most fit, or the most talented, or the most virtuoso, or whatever it might be. For every person who can take that as inspiration, I'd wager there are dozens who take it as a message that they can't compete.
I'm not saying the woke stuff helps, but I don't see it as the major, single factor, rather one among many.
Social Justice is the crack rock, smartphones are the crack pipe
This is a great summary of what we consider to be traditional social media, which consists of people posting things about themselves and others. Obviously, this has ravaged teenage girls' mental health. Where the negative affects on teenage boys come into play are object-based social media (watching other people do something specific). The biggest Youtubers are people who film themselves playing video games. It's hilarious when I look at what my nephews watch on Youtube and think "what is this nonsense" and then notice the channel has 57 million subscribers.
While boys don't have it as bad on regular social media, there are a lot of smart teenage boys who aren't necessarily depressed but by all measures have checked out of the real world. I know a few teachers who are dealing with boys who just won't do any schoolwork and can't stay awake in class. When they tell the parents, they throw up their hands and say it's because they play video games from the second they get home at 3pm until they pass out at 2am. I'm not a parent yet, but you have to be willing to draw a line somewhere.
In Haidt's writing, he argues out that the boy stuff isn't as bad because for boys, online gaming remains an outlet for healthy competition (even if it's not as healthy as sports), while for girls, it's an outlet for the female tendency to "compare and despair". My college was an early adopter of Facebook in the mid 00s, and I remember the instant it was available, my college girlfriend used it exclusively to despair over ways that other girls had it better than her.
But Twitch and a lot of YouTube gamer content strikes me as a substitute for what I did growing up (also an Old Millennial, and a big gamer at the time), which was hanging out with friends and playing NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, and N64. Which, to be sure, wasn't the best use of time, but it was undeniably SOCIAL, and most of my time spent playing video games was with a friend. The Twitch gamer is a substitute gamer friend, bantering with you the same way we used to banter, but he's a creepy facsimile of an actual bantering gamer friend.
My kids are young, but for as long as possible, the way I'm approaching screen time with them is to insist that it's a social activity. We have family movie nights or TV time, and we have family game time. When they get older, maybe they'll have friends over to game or watch movies. But they don't get to sit there, off in their own world, and game or watch YouTube. If you don't like what's on the family TV, you can open a book, but you can't open another screen.
Is having a near age sibling protective?
good article. social media effects would be an interesting target for meta-analysis.
Also, why not a wokeness co-factor story to explain the much greater effects for leftist teens? So right-wing kids really use social media much less?
I still believe wokeness is a big deal in this.
It's kind of hard for an essentially anti-CBT/stoic ideology with high social status to not be.
I don’t find it hard to believe that something that increases competition in zero-sum status games has a net negative effect on mental health. Or as Houellebecq calls it, „extension de la domaine de lutte“.
Mostly agree with everything presented.
>I tend to dislike moral panics that are used to justify government intervention in people’s personal choices or market forces, particularly of the “think of the children” variety.<
While this is an understandable sentiment, it bears mentioning that we do in fact tend to disregard personal choice or market forces when it comes to minors, and with good reason. If little Timmy wants to have candy for dinner every night and mommy says no, we tend to side with mommy. The comparison to drugs/alcohol is very good here. Nearly everyone understands that minors' access to these substances should be restricted despite whatever markets might try and do to supply them, even people who are otherwise heavily pro-market.
>the fact that the most liberal demographics, that is women and LGBT adolescents, are having the most mental problems indicates that there is something to the theory that wokeness causes misery.<
One thought I have on this point is that social isolation is likely to be more devastating to women than men, as women tend to be more interested in other people, by comparison to men who are more likely to be content sitting in their basement playing video games and less interested in scrolling endlessly through facebook status updates. This is potentially supported by the fact that, IIRC, women use social media more frequently than men and are overall more interested in it (though I certainly do not have the time nor the interest to do a deep dive on that particular question like you have here).
I should add that, of course, I also do believe wokeness causes misery. Both can be true at the same time.
My last remark is that another trend I would point to is the destruction of social institutions under the encroachment of the all-powerful state, which is itself another symptom of wokeness. In the past, young people could meet other young people who shared their interests and identities through associations such as church, school clubs, Boy Scouts, et cetera., with church in particular being a big one. All of these have been hollowed out by wokeness and, to the extent that they still exist, are often turned to politics and made to serve as a vehicle for more wokeness, which subverts their actual intended original function of providing a framework for healthy social association. And with COVID even physical attendance of schools was taken away.
Having been a young person myself once, I can recall with some level of confidence that young people do not know how to properly associate with others, and have to be socialized by adults who provide them with proper guidelines and environments in which to practice being social. But if the adults do not provide any such guidelines or environments, or worse yet actively discourage the young people from leaving the house, then the youngsters will naturally wither in isolation with predictable consequences for their social lives upon reaching adulthood.
How has wokeness destroyed social institutions? Putnam wrote Bowling Alone in 1995, and I have seen zero evidence that joining social institutions has significantly decreased recently compared to the long-term trend.
Wokeness is certainly not the *only* factor, but I do believe it is a major one. As Richard has written about before, what we call "wokeness" today started all the way back with the Civil Rights movement and the end of freedom of association. Secular leftism has done a huge number on the church, which previously served as a universal social institution that everyone could participate in with accompanying well-defined and healthy (or at least much healthier compared to woke) behavioral norms.
Except that religious affiliation is much higher in the US then it is in the rest of the developed world, where religious participation and belief declined much earlier than in the US. Also, as was described in Bowling Alone, it's not that Boomers were abnormally unlikely to join associations, it was that the Greatest Generation was abnormally likely to join them. To blame this on wokeism you either need a correlation or causal mechanism and I don't see either. I would also point out that religious participation is declining among the conservative population, so are they also becoming woke?
My view stems in large part from wondering what I would have people actually do with their kids in order to get them out of the house and off of the phone. Church activities are the first thing to come to mind as practically ready-made for the purpose. If you want to propose better options, I'd be curious to hear them, though again they would need to have a solid mechanism for keeping woke out so that parents aren't sending little Timmy off to be taught about the Gender Unicorn and such.
>I would also point out that religious participation is declining among the conservative population, so are they also becoming woke?<
I mean, the answer is quite clearly yes. Many conservatives these days, possibly even most, are hesitant to condemn gay marriage, for instance. That's pretty woke compared to like, the distant past of 10-15 years ago. I think the entire political history of the nation post-WWII could be pretty fairly described as liberals dragging conservatives along in the wake of their quest to move ever leftward. Today's conservative may be unwoke compared to today's liberals, but he can be pretty woke compared to himself 20 years ago, and definitely compared to 40-50 years ago.
"completely possible for teens to become happier in the aggregate while suicide goes down"
I think you mean to say become *un*happier in the aggregate
or
while suicide goes *up*
Thanks, fixed.
Hanania, you may have gotten your cause and effect flipped around vis-a-vis teenaged misery and wokeness (at least before your delve into social media as a root cause). It's not that misery causes wokeness in young people; rather, already miserable youth gravitate towards wokeness. It is either a hopeless ideology (in the case of its White followers), where you're meant to strive for a lifetime to lessen your own fortunes and the fortunes of your kin with no hope of personal reward except maybe some residual alleviation of your burning conscience, or it's an ideology of angst and resentment (in the case of its poc practitioners). Neither of these mindsets are found in mentally healthy people. Consider that the greatest grassroots explosion of wokeness occurred in the summer of 2020, when the youngest generations in the Western World were already collectively at arguably their most miserable point. Lockdowns for months, everyone's granny dying: people were suffering from cabin fever, and no small amount of fear and uncertainty over the future. Oh, and they had been left with nothing to do but patrol their social media accounts, as you mentioned in your article.
I'd be more inclined to think that being miserable makes you liberal. For example, I could imagine that gays alone explain the gap between liberal boys and conservative girls (gays are more depressed).