1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07475...
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07475...
I’ve seen kids not even 3-4 years old already hooked to smartphone screens. Even toddlers around 1 year old with an smartphone mount in their stroller.
Main impact on kids is lack of socialization, lack of emotional regulation and a complete impact on their capabilities to keep their attention. Those used to be indicators for a future failed adulthood.
I remember traditional drugs only becoming present around 14-16 years old. Alcohol was probably the most prevalent, and probably the most dangerous. Followed by Cannabis, tobacco and some recreational drugs like MDMA.
Most of those drugs had a component that actually pushed kids heavily towards socialization and forming peer groups. Now looking back to the results of that drug consumption I would say that most of the individuals engaging on them were able to regulate and continue to what it seems to be a very normal adult life. Obviously tobacco with terrible potential future health effects, but beyond that, everyone I know turned up pretty healthy. Not only that, I remember some time later that the most experimental group (mdma, LSD, mushrooms) of drug users being full of people with Master Degrees and PhDs.
The new technological drugs scare me way more than the old traditional ones. Obviously it is a normal response of the known va unknown. Time will tell.
I can’t find it right now but I read a great comment on legalization that pointed out that a kid experimenting with weed and cocaine in college is doing so for a radically different reason than a kid doing it escape the daily misery of his ghetto neighborhood.
This is also why you’ll often see staunch opposition to legalization in the lower socio-economic classes, with them having seen people close to them destroyed by drug use.
And yes, legalization and regulation would of course also allow harm reduction. But it is good to be able to take the opposition’s perspective :)
Our goal should be to legalize use and then take the money saved from police enforcement and funnel that into programs that get people off drugs. In the US an issue is that the latter part is part of the healthcare system, and we all know that has a lot of issues in serving people who fall into the under-employed category.
Cops will fight tooth and nail against social programs because it reduces their budget when problems are solved.
Look up these programs and you will see centrists claiming the progressive program was bad, but never indicate reasons as to why.
There's at least a theory that people believe will work that hasn't been correctly implemented yet, but whether or not it's feasible to implement at all, I'm not holding my breath.
But isn't this a false correlation, then? Were they destroyed by drug use, or by the daily misery of their ghetto neighborhood?
If you’re going to make a harm reduction argument, you need to do your best to fully account for all the harms in play.
Anyone with a relative dying of addiction has no doubt been long exhausted in watching them circle the pit of their addiction. They are going to be under no illusions regarding the chances there were to escape it, and the choices made to remain there.
Asking if they were escaping from a miserable reality vs chasing a high isn't offensive. It's just dealing with the reality of the situation as it is. The only person I see being offended is someone in denial, blaming the drugs alone rather than allowing any blame to the person using them, trying to imagine them an innocent victim without agency in the matter.
The question is a good one. It actually looks for what caused everything to go wrong, rather than just being pointlessly offended on behalf of the imagined umbrage you think others might feel.
You comment falsely assumes that I don't have familiarity or loss stemming from addiction.
That's an absurd mental picture you've imagined. Using that to undermine the discussion of the reality that people use drugs to temporarily escape from desperate conditions is unsettling and lacks empathy and judgment.
Counterargument: a "very normal adult life" in our generations treats alcohol as basically mandatory for having a good time with a group. As someone who doesn't drink, I'm perfectly happy to go to parties and hang out and socialize, but as the night wears on it becomes less and less stimulating as the alcohol kicks in. People get less interesting on drugs, but they perceive themselves to be having more fun. It's a crutch.
Now, maybe having a social crutch like alcohol is better than having a drug which encourages disappearing from the physical social world entirely, but our generation's answer was hardly healthy.
And I agree. I do not drink, not even in social settings, and I feel like I'm the odd one out for doing so, thus I typically avoid parties and gatherings as much as possible.
I do take something people would consider a drug though, but for different reasons you described. It is to manage pain, anxiety, and depression, difficulty walking, and urinary incontinence. What I take works for all of the problems that affects the quality of my life.
That said, new year is coming up, and I'm definitely not going to drink.
Now imagine that they would not be engaging with silly YouTube videos, but with an AI trying to get them to interact with them in order to learn to speak, to learn about the world. Things which parents can't dedicate enough time to. Then also give the kids ideas for what to do with the parents, what to talk about, tease them about science and stuff they'd normally have no access to, because it is information mostly hidden in books or in an inaccessible format, like dedicated to students.
I do see a huge potential in this, call it cheaply a "nanny for the brain", to help develop it better and faster. There are certainly risks to it, but if it were well done, in a way in which we assume universities are "places well done", it could be better than just having the kids watching TV.
While what you describe may be better than YouTube/TV, there is no replacement for development through human interaction and contact.
Let’s not give parents another excuse to have devices babysit/raise their children.
EDIT: and if your post is being upvoted -- and it seems to be -- I hope it's by people that don't have children, and will later realize how bad of an idea this is once they do have children.
The solution is to replace the nanny/reschool/daycare with a better nanny/preschool/daycare.
1) They can be socially isolated in ways that few children are. An unsupervised septuagenarian can go literal days without speaking to another live human being.
2) They’re more technologically competent than we give them credit for, certainly enough to spend days doomscrolling their politically aligned newsfeeds of choice. The generation who thought their CD-ROM drives were cupholders passed quite some time ago.
3) They have an outsized influence on politics. Not only do they vote more than any other demographic in the US, they are the most likely to turn up and harangue your city council or school board meeting.
Of course, nothing new under the sun, their parents’ generation was mainlining cable news and AM talk radio 20-30 years ago.
This same reasoning is highly applicable to how various "so terrible, they're a threat to X!" are constantly vilified, yet the Normies (who cause most of the problems) get a free pass.
Rigged popularity contests are a terrible way to run a world, yet we insist on it.
What I’m seeing now is social media got so hyper optimized for engagement that it became a passive consumption mechanism, and the only “socialization” left is sharing memes. It’s a widespread digital heroin epidemic
(Edit: corrected typographical error.)
When you look at https://explodingtopics.com/blog/screen-time-for-teens it does not look promising. Video is leading, then Gaming which can include socialization then third come Social media but with Tik Tok leading which I would not categorize as socialization.
I particularly worry about men. The greater cultural and possibly (more controversial) biological susceptibility to isolation coupled with this stuff means a generation of young men who are isolated, hopeless, poor, lonely, and sexless.
Then we have a culture that, depending on which side you listen to, either shames them as potential rapists from the patriarchy or simply “losers.” (IMHO the “woke” shaming is just code for loser, as I have heard said in private.) They are neither. They are victims of exploitation, of a nearly exact analog to the Matrix that is destroying their minds.
I speak mostly of social media and addiction optimized gaming, not all tech. The problem is the apps not the phone. Really anything that works very hard to “maximize engagement” should be considered guilty unless proven innocent. This phrase is code for addiction.
As we have seen the gurus that appeal to such men are the likes of Andrew Tate. As awful as he is Jordan Peterson is actually among the less toxic of the crew since he does occasionally say something good.
In the future we could have gurus for hordes of lonely poor men that make Tate look helpful and wise. This is how we either LARP the Handmaid’s Tale or — worse — ISIS or the Khmer Rouge.
I have two daughters and I fear for their safety in a country full of fascism radicalized angry emotionally stunted men who have been told they are losers and then handed pitchforks.
Our industry is the industry making the opium to which these youth are addicted and that is destroying them. We are destroying the minds of a generation every time any B2C app tries to optimize its time on app KPI.
Mothers and fathers of boys: raise your sons or Andrew Tate will.
Large numbers of desperate people are a danger to society. I harp on men because I think they are more vulnerable (for various reasons and the reasons don’t matter much) to isolation and radicalization, though as we recently saw with our young lady school shooter this is definitely not universal.
I also didn’t mean to dismiss the damage addictionware can do to young womens’ self esteem and mental health, and I have noticed a disturbing rise in “femcel” rhetoric that mirrors the incel cancer. The style of the rhetoric is a little different but it’s coming from similar places and has similar effects.
We need to stop calling it social media too. It stopped being social when algorithmic timelines were introduced and over time it’s evolving toward less and less connection and more shoveling of engagement bait slop.
Additionally, the social activities that coalesced around things like alcohol are out of reach of many teens. I live in a city that had a very active college bar scene. It’s dead and gone. Crackdowns on underage serving and cost drives it away. Happy hour special at a place that other day was $12 for 4 coors lights in a bucket. In 1998, I’d pay $15 for a dozen wings and all you can drink swill for 3 hours.
Nothing new under the sun. Me and my friends were like that 30 something years ago.
Back then, only "nerds" socialized online. Nowadays, everyone does it.
I'm of two minds about this.
On one hand, I'm really glad that kids aren't screwing up their formative years. Drug use during growing/development years can wreck someone's life.
The issue is that, if you are an addict (which is different from physical addiction. Many addicts never get physically addicted to anything), then you'll eventually have problems with drugs; even if they are "socially acceptable" ones, like pot or alcohol (pot being "socially acceptable" is kinda new, around here, but Things Have Changed).
It'll still destroy your life, but, at least, you'll hopefully have something like an education, and living skills, by then, which can help Recovery (and also hinder it).
(1) When I was growing up, nobody had any online presence. I remember life without the internet.
(2) The fact that it is not new does not mean it has not changed in magnitude and addictiveness.
(3) The fact that it is not new does not mean that it is not a problem. It is a growing problem. Especially because societies these days do nothing about their problems except through more technology at them, which rarely solves the underlying issue.
For most people, it probably wasn't until MySpace and the like and the popularization of blogging in maybe the early 2000s that an "online presence" was really a thing although people increasingly had access to email etc.
(My dates may be a bit off but not by a lot.)
One cannot separate the tool from the use. Of course, you are right, though. Technology has done two things: it has eradicated communities by making communities less economically valuable, and it provides a superficial alternative.
But the end result is that people become effectively hooked on using the device. The device is nothing without what is happening on it, but it cannot be deconstructed and separated either into a social component and the technology itself because it is more than the sum of its parts.
So... Maybe in some way one could argue that social media gives some sort of connection were you get some feelings from what others are doing/showing. I mean, technologically it's quite a leap, but in a conceptual way... it's still a bit of a leap but maybe not that big.
Strange Days was released in 1995.
Maximum Mike was, and is, a prophet right alongside Gibson.
edit: Although almost certainly this wasn't the first place people imagined being able to record and playback memories.
Cyberpunk 2013 - join us! Jack in choom
Cyberpunk 2020 - oops sorry, had to reschedule
Cyberpunk 2077 - crazy story, anyway we've got a new date
Cyberpunk ???? - this time, we promise!
The actor was Natalie Wood, and the event is shrouded in mystery about how she died. However, the character who dies in the movie is played by Louise Fletcher.
The porn and the vicarious near-death-experience were just plot points.
That technology exists; it's called empathy, and the extremely powerful form of it innate to humans is arguably our singularly defining characteristic. It's our tech moat, so to speak.
Play that VR game set within in the shark cage. The adrenaline rush is definitely not much of a leap from the real thing.
Celebrities and “socialites” have been idolised for years - Paris Hilton certainly isn’t the doing of this generation, neither is Jackie Kennedy.
If you think that what we’re doing with mobile apps and social media is new, take a look at the 20th century a little harder.
2. People did say that about TV and TV maybe had the potential to be like this. However, TV failed in many ways to be a hyper addictive device. Some of the many reasons: i. Just less content. There wasn’t that much TV content at all. YT probably adds more content in an hour than all the TV content ever created.
ii. You couldn’t choose what you wanted to watch beyond a few dozen channels at best. So you always had opportunities where you were forced to do something different at many times.
iii. The TV wasn’t available to you at all times. You had to go to the den to watch it and you couldn’t take it to school with you.
iv. TV couldn’t specifically target you individually with content to keep you watching. The most amount of targeting TV could do was at maybe a county level.
v. You couldn’t be part of the TV. Social media and phones today make you an integral part of the “show” where a kid can end up having a video of them popping their pants on a playground shown to millions of people. Even in a more ordinary sense, a kid commenting on a video or sending a message to a friend makes them part of the device in a way TV never could outside of extraordinary situations.
The shows had target markets often driven by the need to reach certain demographics, though actual viewer demographics sometimes were surprisingly way off the mark.
Or they weren't and addiction wasn't the crux of their position; and I say that as someone who loves a lot of rock derivatives.
The influence pop icons with broken lives had on teen generations was horribly deleterious (and I'm not even talking about hippies), mainly because malleable and unproperly taught minds rarely see that an artist's respectability is completely separate from his output.
The ancients had the concept of muses for a reason.
No comment on how it is today, but looking back it was terrifyingly nuts - full on religious fervour to the point of mental disorder. When bands broke or people married/died, there would be full on breakdowns and sympathy suicides.
The lack of information might have helped exacerbate the religious mystery and make more space for imagination, fantasy and faith.
I also think social media is a lot worse.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_%28Star_Trek:_The_Nex...
I need to watch this episode again
Aside - I just learned a month ago that there's an official followup miniseries that brought back several of the original actors, titled "Echoes", with hopefully more coming since it's called Season 1. Came out over 2022-2023: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHGrvCp5nsDJ1qSoKZEmm... (the trailers are at the bottom of the playlist)
With Ralph Fiennes. I think that, although strange, it's actually an underrated movie.
“Have you ever jacked-in, wire-tripped..”
“Santa Claus of the subconscious”
Technology certainly is the economic sector that we privilege against all criticism of the harm it does to young people, to voting adults, to information quality, to public discourse, and to democracy itself.
“We have tied all of the smooth functioning of society to producing new technology” — this implies it was a deliberate decision. Whereas in reality, there’s a selection effect where leaders who embrace technology the most aggressively simply get rewarded in money and power, and they go on to promote accelerationist views with that power.
With the logical conclusion that people are increasingly treated as resources to be harvested by technology.
I don’t know the answer, but I refuse to accept determinism (despite not believing in free will, separate conversation), and I think that framing this as an ecological competition between species — humans vs machines — is clarifying.
More seriously, I think there's ample historical evidence that drugs (with a liberal definition, beer, etc) are very popular across various times and places.
(Merriam-Webster, "addiction")
It might be stretching it somewhat, but I think video games, social media, and religion can manifest a habitual need to indulge, negative effects from doing so, and negative effects from not doing so. Perhaps not in most people.
Coping mechanisms/painkillers can naturally cause some people to be "in too deep" because they keep using it and become dependent.
To go deeper, I think one needs to more fully defined "need”. Need for what? Are we talking about needs.. to sustain biological life? Are we talking about needs... To sustain happy and productive lives?
If we take the second definition, there is a pretty clear difference between a desire and a need. Satisfaction of a desire does not necessarily advance that goal, and can very well be counter to it.
From this definition, it seems like some drugs and some uses of drugs are most certainly not necessary while others seem to be contributing to a real psychological need. Some drugs can give people insight into the nature of their own mind or of their experience, or reshape their worldview for the better. They can allow us to experiment with our own consciousness, which seems to be something that we derive a lot of satisfaction and even utility from. In these cases, drugs may be fulfilling a need. Simultaneously we can recognize that drug use intended more just to anesthetize or produce blind pleasure is most likely not contributing to a need, as it was defined above.
> According to Freud, dreaming about trains often symbolizes the journey of life, with the train representing the progression of time and the destination representing death, and the act of riding a train can be linked to unconscious sexual desires due to the sensation of movement and confinement, particularly when experiencing anxiety about missing a train or being trapped on one.
Have you ever considered that humans are simply social creatures, that the only thing really separating us from other animals is our ability to socialize and organise in groups?
There is no programming, it’s our nature.
Humans in their natural environment will interact with other humans socially, mirror their display of emotion, and have a desire for affection.
The next generation weren't interested in facebook, because "that's what moms use" and figured out something different.
As to drugs, now many are legal, so parents can now partake in what used to be illegal for them. Or for harder drugs, "Uncle Bob does drugs, and he's always in trouble".
So one generation of parents acts as a negative example for the next generation to reject.
An astounding book.
No, scrolling on a website is not the same as doing lines of coke in the club bathroom.
Nobody cared about drug addiction until it was politicized. US politicians have a long history of using drug users as scapegoats to win elections to disastrous results. Prohibition, drug war, next are social media bans. The insanity will never end.
[1] Hertlein, Katherine M., and Markie LC Twist. "Attachment to technology: The missing link." Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy 17.1 (2018): 2-6.
Because "addiction" is a very loaded term (with a specific clinical definition when it's not being used colloquially), and the sources you cited used "attachment" instead.
In short, many addictive substances create a chemical dependence that often has awful, even potentially fatal chemical withdrawal symptoms. Behavioral addictions don't cause this, which makes people assume they are entirely something different, and categorically less serious and damaging.
This is wrong- because those withdrawal symptoms, while they do make it harder to quit by making going cold turkey difficult and sometimes impossible, they are not the underlying reason why these drugs are being abused in the first place, nor the reason they destroy peoples lives. The reason is that they stimulate the reward system and/or allow one to escape negative emotions and trauma. Behavioral addictions also do that, and can just as easily ruin ones life, by completely overcoming someones mind and will, such that they no longer are able to live their life, and are unable to escape or quit with willpower, just as much so as with drugs that cause withdrawal. They can still completely ruin your life and drive you to suicide, etc.
Moreover, people also often emphasize that many addictive substances can directly cause serious health problems, or even death. This is also not central to their harmfulness, nor always the case. In fact, for a drug to have substantial abuse potential it must be relatively free from serious adverse health effects, at least in the short term, or else it would become impossible to abuse- the most damaging substances are the ones where people can take higher doses for longer with less adverse effects, because this more strongly emphasizes its ability to be used to strongly stimulate the reward system and escape negative emotions and trauma for longer periods of time - cementing the addiction-, without causing a new negative experience on its own. Methamphetamine for example is unique among stimulants in how benign it is- allowing people to take massive doses over really long periods of time, and not face immediate health issues. Counter-intuitively, this is actually what makes it have so much abuse potential and cause so much harm, compared to other stimulants which quickly make you sick or feel awful at high doses. From this perspective, you can see that the fact that behavioral addictions are also able to be repeated in "large doses" for long periods of time without immediate short term health consequences can make them have a high potential for harm in the long term.
1. Statements like "we can't legalize a drug until we have proven that it's not harmful" are nonsensical given that it's easier to become habituated to drugs that are less harmful. The standard should be, "when measured holistically, does legalization and regulation increase or decrease harm relative to banning and criminalization?"
2. Lumping habitual use and sporadic use together as "abuse" is counter-productive.
3. A humane and just drug policy would focus on removing the causes of people wanting to escape negative emotions rather than on removing the tools they use to escape those emotions.
I have only tried it once, and it permanently eliminated my crippling social anxiety, by temporarily eliminating it, and allowing me to experience and remember what that was like. I felt no desire to use it again, because the (life changing positive) effect was permanent.
Second, it seems to have rapidly diminishing effects that make it self limiting- if sometime takes MDMA too much or too frequently, it stops having the desired effect.
MDMA (and other drugs that fall under the psychedelic umbrella like magic mushrooms or LSD) has has shown some clinical success in dealing with trauma and other mental health issues, but only supervised and combined with professional help. Most people I know that have used MDMA/Ecstasy usually only stopped because the crash sucks as they didn't want to deal with it after. That's the main reason it was used for social gatherings like raves; it really helps eliminate social anxiety.
Every time there's talk of drugs people will just shuffle and repackage some random facts they know about whatever drug in question and preach it like it's something they just discovered.
Absolutely yes: the dopamine circuit.
Audio-visual stimuli from screens and speakers has never been shown to be able to have the same effects as a dopaminergic drug which is to say, completely turning up incentive salience regardless of reward or lack of it. That is why drugs are dangerous.
Technology can only be habit forming (in some contexts, maybe) if it continues to be rewarding in some way. Psychological dependence, maybe, but never addiction, and not even physiological dependence. Addictive drugs do not have to be rewarding or pleasurable. They just hijack wanting.
They are not the same and definitely should not be legislated the same. Enjoying something that is actually fun is not the same as wanting something because it chemically turned on wanting.
You are using the word “medical” to emphasize your point incorrectly- behavioral addictions are included in the modern medical concept of addiction, and the idea that they should be considered categorically separate from substances is an outdated concept. The DSM-5 for example has a diagnostic criteria for gambling addiction.
The same tech completely disrupts how drug-use spreads as well. There is nobody to offer a first hit if you're hanging out online.
---
Though I would caution taking tech as _the_ cause. Things like demographics and the general zeitgeist shouldn't be ignored.
Maybe the kids are really into DARE.
Depression, suicide, and other serious mental health disorders are strongly linked with social media use. Is that better than more kids drinking and smoking pot? I don't know, it's complicated. It's certainly not clearly better and might be significantly worse.
Hand waving away these costs is putting on some seriously rose colored glasses.
>Number of alcohol-induced deaths, excluding accidents and homicides: 51,191 Alcohol-induced deaths, excluding accidents and homicides per 100,000 population: 15.4
>All suicides Number of deaths: 49,476 Deaths per 100,000 population: 14.8
Apparently, not all suicides are caused by social media, and accidents may be more important here. I just want to offer some data that can be easily fetched.
I would not be so sure of that: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/farmville-playing-mom-admits-sh...
Only if you value your time at exactly zero.
> The worst that can happen is you'll feel sad if people bully you online, but that's the fault of people, not the technology.
By that logic it’s also your body’s fault to react poorly to drugs, not the drugs’.
Thinking of it in terms of “fault” is also not very productive. I’d say it’s definitely a (possible) negative consequence of social media usage that might otherwise not have happened, and as such worth studying.
I can say with some amount of confidence that the number of people wasting their talent and life in making up bullshit engagement algorithms, who thought about it as a way of getting people away from drugs, has been exactly zero. So, it is definitely not something to be proud of, but maybe something to think of as a funny coincidence, provided that the premise actually holds.
> The worst that can happen is ...
That you'll remain or become an idiot, or suffer physically and mentally as a result of being inactive while consuming the garbage your proud tech workers shove down your head.
Creating a new addiction to replace the last generation’s isn’t really something to be proud of. As developers, we should be aiming to create ways to communicate that aren’t addictive and facilitate genuine connection with others that includes their highs, the lows, and financial/socioeconomic transparency.
It's along the lines of your theory, the internet is filling in a base need for a segment of society that's always been there.
Expands horizons, connects self to world, catalyzes cults and psychoses.
Also, you typically need to be unsupervised with friends to get into drugs, something teenagers no longer have access to compared to 10-15 years ago. If we look at the social decline due to the pandemic, what made experts think these kids would bounce back? They are forever changed, and will forever be less social than other generations because they missed out on formative experiences.
Perhaps the generalized fear is not so much about "coddling", but concrete realities. I do not envy them.
[0] https://www.axios.com/2023/11/20/american-housing-market-old... [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-a... [2] https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-co... [3] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/how-does-medical-i...
Every generation has challenges and benefits. Framing the narrative can happen in any direction and the variance in group is bigger than the variance between.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/09/05/how-gen-z-outpaces-past-...
[1] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/americans-wages-are...
[2] https://www.protectedincome.org/news/labor-day-peak-65-trade...
[3] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...
If you’re going to make a claim this bold and this counter to the prevailing narrative, you’re gonna need to cite a better source than an outbrain-riddled webpage that tells me to “watch our video to find the lede we buried”. I’m not saying this isn’t true, but extraordinary claims require good sourcing and explanation.
Redfin did the analysis quoted https://www.redfin.com/news/homeownership-rate-by-generation...
Unless you're specifically 26 years old, I suppose? This analysis seems far from scientific and cherry picks data in strange ways.
What do you see as the prevailing narrative? The one I see is homeownership itself, which suggests that homeownership has been seen as being hotly desirable. I strongly suspect we wouldn't have a homeownership narrative to speak of if ownership was unwanted. When something becomes unusually desirable like homeownership has, it is not unexpected to see an uptick in participation around it; in this case owning a home. Much of the urban age has been marked with the majority of the population being renters. Everyone wanting to own a home with such furor is historically unusual.
I expect homeownership has become so desirable as it has become seen as a way to build wealth. While, historically, housing only kept pace with inflation at best, real home values have risen by unfathomable amounts in the last decade or two. Which, again, attracts people willing to risk it all for a chance at some of that wealth opportunity. It would be unusual if said generational group had comparatively lower ownership rates given the "FOMO" aspect. People run away when prices are falling, not when they are rising.
Given the market we've watched, the extraordinary claim would be that Gen-Z has lower ownership rates compared to previous generations at the same age.
It mathed out about even. I decided to go with renting instead of buying, with the logic that the S&P didn’t need me to buy it a new roof every 15 years or to work in its garden every weekend.
It worked nicely too, growing the money that would otherwise have gone into mortgages and property tax, letting me take some of it out recently and buy a house with cash.
I don’t see much of this attitude in my younger friends now. But living cheap and saving does actually work.
You need very little on hand cash to get a very low interest rate. Much lower than asset loans at equivalent levels of wealth.
I don’t see any data on that page supporting this claim. The current decade is growing much faster than the previous one, and they only show data up to 2023.
> Health spending increased by 7.5% from 2022 to 2023, faster than the 4.6% increase from 2021 to 2022. The growth in total health spending from 2022 to 2023 is well above the average annual growth rate of the 2010s (4.1%).
[1] https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-i-dont-inv...
They're comparing to hosting dips in the world wars and while I assure you ww3 will have enough loss of life to make houses quite cheap a third time, you still won't want them because they'll be covered in radioactive contamination.
The issue isn't blind supply and demand, it's that we've made construction expensive through code and arbitrary supply chain constraints and we're planning to deport all the construction workers. Even if population grown naturally slows to zero we will simply stop building houses because it won't be profitable. That's what got us here in the first place.
Probably the wrong place to be barking up this tree though.
I hope we get a union with a draft and such.
I wonder how the economics stack up, because intoxicants aren't free. If the researchers are saying there's X less drug use, then presumably that either implies (a) teenagers are now spending X more on other areas instead (and what are they?), or (b) teenagers now have X less money.
The only generation I can think of without a similar formative crisis (in the US at least) is Gen X. Does the death of Kurt Cobain count?
covid was actually something everyone felt personally - not just empathized with through media. I feel like I just started recovering mentally from the lockdowns - all my college years eaten up by them.
when i was a child, there was no security in airports. like literally NONE. you could walk in and buy a flight with physical cash. if you wanted an international flight, there was a metal detector like you might find in a night club
government ID and drivers licence did not have your photograph on it, and some state drivers licenses were printed on non-laminated card. there was also no functional internet surveillance (there were no good search algorithms or tools in the early internet, so the government couldnt search either).
but the real big change, which is kind of what everyone felt i think, is the whole world was celebrating the end of the cold war and so vehemently protested going into the middle east, and the government just did it anyway. the largest protests in the history of the west were against that war and it was all totally ignored https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War
then we got the PATRIOT act, NSA/CIA spying on the population, heavily armed police. btw, in the 1990s you would NEVER see police with assault rifles and armoured trucks etc except for swat teams in major cities and the ATF. The idea of your local police department having a heap of military equipment was crazy. a great example of this is the LA riots in '92 - they had to call in the army and the national guard because the police simply werent equipped for it
and they would run these polls on tv, like gallup polls, falsely claiming that 20%+ of people publicly supported the war
even though it didnt affect anyone as much personally, it was the turning point where the gov just started brazenly ignoring people and introducing the heavy duty surveillance state, which was especially painfully felt in aus, canada, new zealand, the us, and the uk. and covid19 tyranny was only possible because of what bush did in response to 9/11 - it physically could not have happened in the 1990s as there were no government agencies that could have done it
AR-15s are more versatile than shotguns, though less powerful they are more accurate. If your going to carry a long gun around, it's probably the most logical option.
Basically anyone who isn't a prohibited person in America can field the same equipment. Though I think police have more access to restricted ammunition.
- the TV
- the radio
- board games
- card games
- video games
- theaters
- phones and faxes
- the mail
I still don't think they stand on the same foot as vodka.
As to why I choose to abstain, I honestly am just not interested in drinking or doing drugs. I don't see any benefit to it socially, since I have more fun with my friends doing things while they are sober, and I don't want to be one of those adults that can't socialize without it. Also, the consequences for getting caught are high.
Could it be that, kids are doing less drugs because they’re more informed, less bored, and less reckless than previous generations?
We all aspire that our kids will do better than we have. We did our best to instill a sense of confidence and worth in them.
What if it is finally starting to just, f’ing work?
Taking this on a bit of a tangent, but as an elder millennial, I recall having been told (by elder relatives in their mid-30s at the time) all about how one day I'd too be an "old fogey" looking down on "teens being teens" and how such progression is just the way of things. Hell, I still hear people preaching such "wisdom" today to their youngers.
Yet here I am, just past the age I'm supposedly meant to start ragging on "kids today", and all I can remark is that this same 16-22 set you speak of are remarkably respectful, polite, and considerate, perhaps more so than my own cohort at that age. I almost worry they're not rebellious enough for their own good.
(He has no desire to start drinking etc early or at all at this point.)
Long term health impacts are high, as someone in my 50s I'm certainly doing better for my choice. And yes, not making stupid decisions under influence also cannot be underestimated.
At least when I was that age, it was usually the low income people who's greatest achievement in life would be avoiding prison, who usually turned towards smoking, alcohol, drugs and sex. See "Common People" and similar 80s/90s Britpop songs.
What changed?
I grew up in a lower middle class family, and for me the feeling that I could end up like that - as many people I went to school with did - was what pushed me to achieve. My parents could only just afford their bills, so I didn't get any handouts from them. Of course I don't have a Lambo, so maybe I'm considered a failure by Gen Z? Has the boundary of what is considered "successful" shifted?
But high schoolers I know today seem more even keeled about things. They are graduating into a world where fast food jobs start at $17, no one needs to go to college if they don't want to, and they are accustomed to a world where everything is temporary and digital.
I think the strongest evidence of this is the sharp decline in military recruitment.
A fast food job might be $17/hr, but the cost of gas is >2x what it was when that same job paid $8/hr, not to mention other basic costs like groceries, rent, and buckle up if you have to go to the doctor. Pay has simply not kept up with the cost of living for most Americans.
Why would anyone be happy that everything is ephemeral? That implies a lack of stability, more anxiety about the future, less confidence that you can weather bad times.
Humans are tactile creatures, everything being digital leads to a counter-intuitive sense of isolation - more connected, but less personal. There are positives too, but as an older Millennial, it has been interesting to be along for the ride as the potential of the internet and social media went from a superpower, to kryptonite. Who knows where things will be in 5-10 years, but it's hard not to see how some of our greatest tools are being turned against us in the search for more profit.
Millennials are, if anything, brutally realistic - a trait required to navigate the last 16 years. We were forced to watch as the last bit of life in the idea of a strong middle class was snuffed out, and had to enter the workforce right as the GFC hit. Our parents were the last generation where one could reasonably expect to live a life that truly lived up to the ideal of the American Dream - that one could get educated, get a job, buy a decent house and raise a family, without it being especially noteworthy to do so. For many Millennials, if not every generation following, it is essentially nothing more than a dream at this point. Corporate greed, and a government fully captured by it, has all but killed the middle class, and I fully expect that the advent of AI - rather than being a boon for the middle class - will drive a nail in its coffin. Those with the most to gain are already on top, and I've already heard way more people here talk about what they'll be able to do without needing to hire anyone, than I have about how the people left jobless will benefit. It is readily apparent that nobody with any power is going to do anything about it before a significant amount of suffering is felt - maybe not even then. All you have to do is listen to how people talk about it, as if everyone will magically figure out something else to do when every sector starts losing jobs simultaneously. Our society has a greater chance of eating itself alive first.
I consider myself lucky amongst most Millennials - I entered the workforce before the GFC, then joined the military shortly after it (not due to the GFC, but the timing worked out). I was able to get far enough along in my career in those first years though that I never had to struggle with finding a job like many did. I was able to get a house in my 30s thanks to the GI bill. Very few of those I grew up with are in the same boat, many are living much the same as they were 15 years ago - unable to save enough to buy a house, facing reduced job prospects in the future. What reason do they have to be anything _but_ pessimistic?
For me personally, I think we've simply lost the battle against greed, and there is a tipping point after which reigning it back in is impossible without burning it all down. That's something nobody should want, least of all the rich, but it's played out many times in history, and we keep falling into the same trap, just different ways. I think this time it probably was Citizens United where we lost our grip, that decision made it inevitable that corporate interests would be the driving force of government, not the needs of its people. Who can say for sure what will happen, but we're all along for the ride regardless.
This is probably the worst example. In 2008 gas cost as much as it does now and fast food did only pay $8/hr. https://www.creditdonkey.com/gas-price-history.html
> Millennials are, if anything, brutally realistic
No, your entire post is an example of the dramatic doomerism waxing on the anxieties of normal life. Complaining about anxiety is one of the hallmarks of a millennial.
It's much more about people ha ing less friends and socializing less
They don't? I'm pretty sure I saw unsupervised teens hanging out at a mall even just a few days ago.
Not all locations are the same though, so maybe there has been a noticeable decrease where you're at. Personally, I think I've felt an increase if anything.
I dont have a clue what your upbringing looked like, but even up to around age of 25, I never ever expected nor was told to expect any of that. The success despite all that is much sweeter.
Maybe thats some US thing, being raised in eastern Europe you were born to shit, you were considered insignificant shit and that was about it. Thats what being occupied for 4 decades by russians causes to society, on top of other bad stuff they are so natural with.
Maybe stop telling kids how they are all special and great and all will be astronauts and let them figure it all out by themselves? Teenagers being frustrated that they wont be owning some posh expensive house, thats pretty fucked up upbringing and life goals to be polite, thats not success in life in any meaningful way.
I recommend checking biggest regrets of dying people, focus on careers and money hoarding are consistently at the top.
Posh expensive house? Nowhere was that mentioned.
The post-WWII 20th century American social contract was: "You will have the ability to get married, live in a modest home of your own, own a car, raise 2-3 young children, and go on a modest annual vacation even if you work in a factory".
My dad’s parents owned their own home. The _biggest_ one they owned was 1000 square feet, which they viewed as cavernous. The one my dad lived in as a small child had no indoor plumbing and the heat came from a single wood burning stove. I was alive when my dad first lived in a house with central air.
My mom’s parents never owned a home while she lived with them.
The numbers will back me up that this was a completely typical middle class American experience post ww2.
What seems to have changed is a) the class of housing stock available. b) trends around _where_ people live and c) the narrative about the past.
Few under 50 actually want a suburban home in a no-name town with a single domestic holiday a year and a job requiring physical labor (and hard limits on clocking in and out) that feeds your family with industrial calories.
If you do, you can get that with practically zero training in a mid-tier hospitality job (or working as an e.g. bank teller) with an hour commute each way. Small-town suburban homes are cheap.
its just as easy to reach the exact opposite conclusion when everything is so hopeless and nihilistic. you are extrapolating way too much here.
less unsupervised time, location tracking from parents, unregulated dopamine from chatgroups and algorithms in public social media, and the risk of fentany and other poisons in drugs, are much better contributors to extrapolate from
There's a bigger cultural shift going on where people just don't like hanging out with each other anymore.
For me, drugs were:
- socialization. I met a lot of friends through alcohol & drugs and they became the social glue for my circle. Alcohol & drugs became a large part of my identity.
- a way to cope with boredom. Every day is a party when you're high.
- identity. In my generation, drugs were mostly cool and associated with iconoclasts, artists, etc.
Young people's culture changed. I don't think kids see alcohol, drugs and being out of control as cool anymore. I don't know specifically what changed this. Better social messaging, mass prescribing of ADHD meds, more competitive job markets.. Social media and multiplayer gaming have both ramped up competitive drives for what used to be more relaxing activities. Maybe the current optiate and meth epidemics are more effective as a warning than, say, the crack epidemic was for us?
Kids have tech to glue them together(poorly in many cases, but it does fill the niche). Kids have internet subcultures to define their cultures now. Alternative lifestyles are much more accessible and take much less risk to participate in vs my childhood in the 80s. You don't need drugs to meet people or forge common identities.
Kids are never bored anymore. I suspect there has never been a better time to be a kid in a boring small town. If you have bandwidth, you have culture. You have better shipping, home delivery, cheap imports, etc. Affluence seems more common than it used to be, even in our highly divided economy.
Just a personal anecdote, but there’s still a lot of house parties and stuff going on, and most people will have a couple drinks, some will have none, etc. But you are absolutely expected to handle yourself appropriately, getting too drunk or taking drugs you couldn’t handle isn’t tolerated and you’ll find yourself uninvited to future events. It is significantly more socially acceptable to drink no alcohol and take no drugs, than it is to get too drunk and act inappropriately.
From what I’ve seen, this is partly a function of embedded social media. A drunk night at a friend’s isn’t just a bad decision, it reflects poorly on everyone in the room, including the host, in a semi-permanent and semi-public way.
I'm curious what GenZ+ thinks about the movie "The Boys & Girls Guide to Getting Down" which is a tongue-in-cheek, funny look at mid 00's partying culture in LA. That's not really my generation, but is a bit of a window into what I think was the last generation to really embrace intoxication.
The more i read about GenZ’rs and their attitude to work and life the more i like this generation.
Yes, people should be expected to handle themselves appropriately. Getting black-out wasted with alcohol is not cool. It’s just unhealthy. Way to go!
getting too drunk or taking drugs you couldn’t handle isn’t tolerated
and you’ll find yourself uninvited to future events. It is significantly
more socially acceptable to drink no alcohol and take no drugs, than it
is to get too drunk and act inappropriately.
I've interacted with a number of Gen Zers in their 20s and Millenials in their early 30s, some in passing and some on a more regular basis. In my experience that cohort spans the gamut. Some are teetotalers, sure. Most use drugs (cocaine, ketamine, assorted off-label prescription stuff, marijuana, etc.) at least occasionally, some daily. It really doesn't seem all that different from when I was their age. Excluding peer pressure, most of the societal ills that drove my peers to experiment with drugs still apply. Conversely I've seen a lot of my peers start to dial back drug and alcohol use as they get older.
One of the reasons is - it has become too difficult and costly (at least where I live). Even for weed, which was pretty much kosher unless you were caught by the police keeping KGs on your person or home, it has become too difficult to procure and not get caught. That could be a reason.
In many places where weed is available like cigarettes - maybe it’s not the forbidden fruit anymore. That danger or aura of different is gone with it.
Here's a 2018 study following kids into adulthood and questioning them on their substance abuse: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5985671/
My brother is one of those really bad cases, while I got my diagnosis just recently; never had more than a slight drinking problem which has almost disappeared since the I started taking medication.
I met so many people only through smoking weed. And because weed is such a laid back drug, we were all laid back and friendly with each other.
What I learned to hate over the years was that daily routine of finding something to smoke. We had our dealers we phoned up or sometimes we would deal ourselves to finance our consumption.
Dealing drugs was another level though. Hostilities arose. Some people claimed turf and threatened others with violence, those were "miraculously" found by the police and landed in jail. Also dealers that scammed others. The scene had a way to police themselves. Those were the good years.
Later the quality became worse and the quantity as well. It was no longer... how should I put it,... fun and games but people discovered it as a source of making profit. Even friends or people you considered friends would try to scam you and you weren't any different. That time began approximately when the Afghanistan wars began and the CIA was cut off from the cannabis sources.
It was like this, we would smoke weed in the summer and black afghan in winter. The black afghan fell off. What remained was green hash from the turks and weed, which was stretched with hairspray and silica sand.
I quit doing ganja, also because I hated being stoned all day every day and having to do the daily finding weed routine. I was so tired of it, also "what am I doing with my life".
I lost most "friends", I had to, to not be exposed to this crap on a daily basis. I wanted to get somewhere in life not just consume weed all day and be a loser who got nothing done. Better late than never.
I very rarely do resin nowadays, not by smoking but orally, and it's like once a year or every 2 years. Cannabis is definitely good for your health, if not overdone.
Our habits from then continued on. While I can't prove this, I would suspect that this isnt due to any lack of vice, but because plenty of people have that feeling satisfied by short form algorithm apps.
Pre-social media, you could get drunk and embarrass yourself, and forget about it by the next day. Now everything is recorded. Information about alcoholism is easier to come by, and there are influencers like worldoftshirts who show people what life as an alcoholic is like. I don't see how anyone could want a drink after watching content like that. Smoking weed in front of a camera doesn't seem as edgy as it used to now that it's legal. Having red eyes in a photo is annoying. Vaping has always had a cringe factor.
All of this tech is giving us the ability to look in the mirror and see what we're doing to ourselves.
Even the “cool kids” are staying inside and using their phones all day. Cool used to mean you were at the party, now it just means you have a high snapchat score.
Other thing is genuine fear of accidental fentanyl consumption. They’re making fake Xans with fentanyl in them, fentanyl is being found in coke powder. Plenty of people aren’t taking the risk with street drugs anymore. Jelly Roll said so in an interview, he’s a big recreational drug user but doesn’t trust the supply anymore. Good job dealers!
Same applies to “cool”ness, as there aren’t a handful of tastemakers that decide on “what’s more or less cool for a given environment”.
Drug selling is all about repeat customers I don’t really believe this happens apart from accidents.
I agree with kstrauser—most cases of fentanyl in cocaine are likely due to contamination from preparing multiple drugs in the same space. Accidental fentanyl poisonings usually involve people using other downers, like heroin or counterfeit benzos, rather than cocaine.
That said, there’s a theoretical motive for intentionally adding fentanyl to cocaine. While cocaine is highly mentally addictive, it doesn’t cause the same physical dependence as opiates. A low, undetectable dose of fentanyl could enhance the high and subtly increase physical dependence, potentially leading to more frequent use. It’s an unethical but plausible strategy for some dealers.
Regarding cost, fentanyl is cheaper than it might seem. While per-gram prices for cocaine and fentanyl are similar, fentanyl’s potency makes it far more economical in effective doses. A gram of fentanyl can be diluted across hundreds of grams of cocaine, making it cost-effective for someone aiming to enhance or manipulate their product.
The real challenges are: 1. Mixing: Distributing fentanyl evenly in cocaine is extremely difficult without specialized equipment. Uneven mixing could make some doses dangerously potent. 2. User safety: Even tiny, “safe” doses can become deadly when combined with alcohol, benzos, or other opiates, all of which are common among cocaine users.
In short, the risk and complexity of mixing fentanyl properly likely outweigh the benefits for most dealers. But that doesn’t rule out less ethical or less cautious individuals attempting it.
(I first wrote a too-lengthy reply of ~800 words as I'm too sleepy to write well atm, so I got ChatGPT to condense it which got rid of 70% - https://pastebin.com/raw/khm2VFxN )
Eyebrow raise.
Can anyone who better knows the reality here chime in?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/545967/snapchat-app-dau/
If parents think it’s cool, teens won’t.
Pretty clear cut to me.
I strongly suspect that physically separating highschool students from their older peers for a couple of years meant that most of the older kids who were in to drugs etc. graduated and were not around to introduce their younger peers to these vices.
It's the flip side of the phenomenon whereby many university societies shut down and either never reopened after the pandemic or struggled to get going again (examples I know about including swing dance clubs and solar car racing teams), because the only students with enough experience to teach their younger peers had by then all graduated.
Makes you think of other, perhaps smaller, things that may have gotten a gap in physical hand offs. Perhaps I'm generalizing too strongly here, but certainly someone that was a middle school teacher or something before and after covid might have some observations on little oddities that may have escaped the public eye.
Simply put, it's not as cool now.
https://wisqars.cdc.gov/fatal-injury-trends/
That chart shows the rate has hovered around 4000 per month for years. That's 4000 too many, but at least it's not increasing.
Since the spread of social media, suicide rates are up for children, significantly: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db471.pdf
> The suicide rate for people aged 15–19 did not change significantly from 2001 through 2009, then increased 57% from 2009 through 2017
> For people aged 10–14, the suicide rate tripled from 2007 through 2018
If the rate has gone and population as well, how come the total number is about the same?
Peak social media?
Nor are people in their 20s (that is, both groups are having much less sex). That is the most worrying thing to me. People are not even engaging in the most fundamental, unavoidable, pleasurable human drive.
They seem very much like traumatized people, on a massive scale, just trying to survive.
Every few years I like to leave the world for a bit and do something else to reset a bit. For example I just finished walking 779km on the Camino in Spain.
What you said is essentially true for the vast majority of people in our modern world. What we have built is terrible for us, and we’re all suffering and very sick.
Many people just get hungry and inhale the most convenient thing they can to scratch the hunger itch. McDonald's is always busy. People would be there on Christmas day if it was open. These people aren't into food as pleasure, they just don't want to be hungry. Of course with meal replacements bottles etc McDonald's isn't even the bottom of that particular barrel.
It's the same with sex. I've met people who define themselves by their sexuality. They consider it a primary pursuit in life. But for others it's just scratching an itch. I've realised I'm basically that way. It doesn't mean that much to me, it's just something my body makes me do. Porn is now everywhere and more easily accessible than drugs. People are now able to reach for McDonald's or the meal replacement, but for sex.
If you have kids, do you see them as less mature than how you perceived yourself at their age ?
TBH I feel the opposite: current kids have a lot more to deal with, and are expected to be much much more down to earth than a few decades ago. The most basic things: a single post on an SNS can stick with them for the rest of their life, yet we moved half of our social life online.
For sure not. They are pushed to play in a stage and fake drama. Decades ago, many 13 years old kids worked for 10-16 hours a day.
We are simply blind to how much even the relatively recent past sucked.
That was back in the 50's/60's I think he was spot on why this generation can't see past the last scroll or click. They don't have perspective because they have not been bred to have it. It's very sad.
Did 'bred' once include upbringing? I thought it began and ended with mate selection, pairing, and procreation.
One angle that hasn't been researched enough is the link to anti-anxiety and anti-depression medication. These has been a significant rise in the prescription of both to young adults: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/anxiety-prescripti...
And on these medications there are often severe interactions with alcohol and drugs which would be enough to frighten off most people. Some e.g. bupropion even reduce addictive tendencies entirely.
My kids are not on social media. They eat like pro athletes. They ask me why I'm eating things with higher amounts of sugar or ultra-processed foods. They do an hour of gym class at school every weekday and then they want to do sports every night of the week and on the weekend. They do their homework and get straight As. They are concerned about bullying and suicide -- they talk to each other, even siblings, in a healthy and caring way.
My oldest couldn't understand why people drink alcohol if it's bad for you. I explained that some people like the way it makes them feel, "So what? It's bad for you. Why would anyone do that to their body?" They couldn't understand why I bought a gas guzzling luxury sports car instead of an electric car given the state of the environment (I've wanted one my whole life and I could finally afford one, yes it's selfish and they are more ethical than I am).
There are definitely a bunch of things going on with Gen Z and Alpha that have made (some of) them this way. But one of the results is that they're not interested in a lot of unhealthy things simply because they know they're unhealthy. They can't understand why we do things that we know are bad for us, the environment, etc. and they're probably right.
They're not perfect, but I do have faith in the next generation and we're going to see some amazing leaders come out of this group.
I would further postulate that your parenthood community is more affluent than your childhood community.
My point being: the lifestyle you describe (and its offset from the median) has "always" (post-war at least) been common in "nice" places. But nice places are unusual.
To expand on this point: American kids today are facing a world that’s drawn up the ladder behind them economically, and their only hope of escaping the pit of despair is to work themselves to the bone for the dregs of pay available to them. Unhealthy habits cost precious wage-earning time. Their intoxicant of choice is prescription medications because they’re covered by insurance, and that’s largely kept things from boiling over into harming the ascended old people — until recently, anyways.
> I do have faith in the next generation and we’re going to see some amazing leaders come out of this group.
Not if today’s leaders have anything to say about it. What leadership arises is, to date, captured by the pre-existing social structures and has had no power to keep the ever-older graying generations from holding the reins away from them. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when public health insurance is taken away, as withdrawing the last of the price-accessible drugs will certainly put their skills to the test.
I remain hopeful for the outcome, but the circumstances are already set in the recent past. What a time to be a social scientist, though!
Your kids are big outliers then. I wouldn't extrapolate to the general young population.
People aren't robots, or we would be living in a sad world
What did you do to make them behave like that ? That's uncommon, at least in occidental society. Closer to what the CCP does.
I wonder if there is correlation to the opioid crisis, where the "downsides" (if you want to call it that) of drug abuse are so visible to teenagers that they are staying away from it. Doing drugs when it's associated with being "cool"/interesting like rappers is one thing, but when you associate it to fentanyl zombies living in the streets it loses a lot of its glamour.
I was not able to find the regional breakdown so it's just a conjecture though.
I wonder if that impacts teen drug use too, because for the first time opponents have a tangible risk to point to instead of just a dumb frying pan commercial and fearmongering.
My personality has changed a little, but I'd still probably jump at it today, if it weren't for the fear of fentanyl. I'm not worried about addiction, I'm worried about death.
They also left out that having sex is on the decline and that is 100% a bad thing for our society.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/12/who-needs-the-da...
Or do teenagers get legal access to credit cards in the US ?
Psychoactive prescriptions are up probably orders of magnitude in the last fifty years.
People have been talking about "self medicating" with alcohol and other legal drugs to deal with various problems for decades. Now there are legal "doctor medicating" options.
World's smallest violin plays.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/de36eb98-f28d-4594-9ae6-624d25802...
I find it weird that we don’t give kids coffee to help them focus on math. (But amphetamine is fine?) There is no evidence coffee is bad for kids.
Psychedelics are so similar to kid level playfulness — and sometimes I think it could be helpful to help them see the big picture.
Even cannabis— we know it’s controlled use is fine for kids, based on studies of usage for epilepsy, etc.
Why do we wait till kids try it themselves under suspect circumstances rather than introducing it with intention?
Just provoking some free thought.
if you are talking about a "kid" of 16, 17 years old, that's less problematic. But a parent shouldn't be part of all experiences of a young person, much less actively pushing things.
The current teen not doing drugs are mostly the sons of the former teen not being killed by drugs on its 20's (because they didn't do drugs, or were able to quit drugs before it was too late).
I wonder if an effect of the Fentanyl epidemic could be traced in the genetic makeup of the future USA population, when the children of all the young that died (obviously) never appear in the population pyramid.
Anyway, I'm not sure and of that is true. It's just one set of possibilities.
I get the point about kids being afraid of taking any risks being bad. But why is taking drugs important to someone’s life in a way that riding a mountain bike and risking hurting yourself doesn’t satisfy?
Ritalin like drugs is out there as well but I dont have much inside inot how common it is.
That is a tiny tiny sample compared to the study so it does not in any way say that the study is wrong. It is just what I myself see and hear around me. (and what the police see a lot of )
Teens and young adults today are doing less sex, less drugs. All those can't be wrong unless todays teens are collectively less truthful than tennagers from previous eras. I doubt that.
But it's possible that this generation is wiser/ more cynical and doesn't believe in anonymous surveys.
I know I don't.
I was at a family event last night and all the cousins and their friends were using zins - tobacco pouches. I don’t see those mentioned in this data under nicotine in the article.
Plus weed is legal now in many places. Kids don't want to do what their parents are doing.
As 1 data point, I have a cousin who is 17, and I am 35.
As a 17 year old, she's been taught the dangers of cigarettes, that drinking is bad, and to avoid drugs for a number of years already.
I'm not saying this is bad... it just feels like previous generations (Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, etc) did not really go into the informational side about the risks of drug use from a personal level, and moreso approached don't do drugs like an episode of COPS, which focused more on the risk as a scare tactic.
Guess my age?
I give my kids my* advice. One had a 6 month period of getting fucked up, and now doesn't touch anything. Another, 'doesn't inhale', and has never touched alcohol.
They have also learned to shut the fuck up when being lectured by some teacher that is parrotting (sp?) the party line, and they howl at the 'touch drugs snd you'll become an addict' government bullshit.
My conclusion?
1/100: Scientists need to be young now to understand,
I'm not saying it's not phone addiction, or fentanyl in the weed, but is it really that hard to believe that the youths just don't want to do drugs as much as your generation did?
We’ve trained younger generations to be extremely risk adverse and they’ve listened. I line they’re probably dangerously exposed to other risks that we don’t have generational knowledge of yet.
I'm personally not saying the isolated health aspect of reduced drug and alcohol use is a bad thing. In a vacuum it is obviously positive. When you consider how they function in a broader social system it may turn out that its not a positive change.
What I find interesting is the general lack of care among folks here at HN. There was a comment thread about some person in AL alluding to not being able to find qualified workers at their government contractor implying a morale hang up on “weapon systems”
I’d argue tech kills more folks than these contractors but people can easily look past that.
(Or 1 insurance CEO being killed being perceived as worse than 50'000 being killed by denied insurance claims)
For me it's just a cultural shift, it's no more cool to be that guy that smoke weed or is drunk. That's all.
Self reported with nothing actual to verify (e.g., hair sample, school sewer water sample, etc.) Self-reported data is notorious for being unreliable. Why would this be any different?
Editorial: What a waste of time and money. Hopefully taxpayers aren't paying for this.
For me at least the pull of cannabis and other drugs, never did real hard and addictive drugs like heroin, was that they were illegal and the effects weren't as bad as the lectures said they were. So I thought what's true about cannabis is also true about cocaine, lsd, psilocybin, xtc etc, but I've seen enough movies about heroin addicts going to waste. I was wrong about lsd and psilocybin and coke had no positive effect on me, except once I became Mr super cool monopoly player ans the other time I was full of energy, but I believe it was mixed with something other than coke. LSD was very uncontrollable, the 1st time was great, simple laugh and dance, the next time was awful and I suffered from it for many years. Psilocybin then, with friends cleared my mind and I was able to articulate myself and think clearly like never before. Amphetamine, I'll never forget the sour smell, but essentially a useless drug, except to stay awake. MDMA varying degrees of happiness and community. But the worst drug was nicotine. Useless, super addictive and really bad for your health. So hard to quit and it's everywhere and it's even worse now with all the e-cigarettes / vapes. Nicotine is an epidemic that needs to be eradicated. It's pure evil.
https://news.umich.edu/missing-rebound-youth-drug-use-defies...
It was clear ever back when the Dutch decriminalised weed that its normalisation led to youth not being that much interested any more, and so it was everywhere else where weed was legalised decades later.
But hey, just because the Dutch have had decades of experience, the rest of the world still isn't able to learn from them.
It's time to end the war on drugs, once and for all. And DARE etc can go and die in a hellfire where it belongs.
> The initial drop in drug use between 2020 and 2021 was among the largest ever recorded.
No surprise, with the world in lockdown and most schools in lockdown it was harder to get drugs, and meeting up to consume drugs could in many countries lead to a knock on the door or even a raid from the police - it happened quite the surprising amount of times in Germany.
Real problem they had was heroin. So they made heroin(or some replacement) free, pushing out drug dealers from the market. Importantly: providing other help to addicts, so they could/would be part of society.
https://youtu.be/6OYLoPvLzPo?feature=shared (1h video comparing situation in US, Portugal, Netherlands; Netherlands part starts around 27:00)
edit: political -> media-driven
> Conservatives generally have more negative attitudes to drug use
That is categorically false.
I think it would be interesting to look at whether the rate of physical / sexual abuse has changed, since that's significantly correlated with use of hard drugs.
From an unexpected conversation with some younger people not long ago (though not this young), they may have just switched to LSD.
Besides if anything I'd say current generations have less trauma to avoid so they're more likely to use it than past generations.
My personal take is that the net social impact is positive for alcohol, marijuana, hallucinogens, and maybe some of the party drugs. For most people, they tend to be a social lubricant, tool for exploration, and source of fun.
I think that smartphone use probably balances out negatively. I think for most people, they have a pretty severe negative impact on their lives, and for some, an extremely negative impact.
The worst outcomes for drug use are probably worse than those for smartphones, but not by too much in my opinion.
Social media usage on the other hand has been normalized and now humanity's social fabric is in the control of a few companies who are happy to rent it out to the highest bidder. This has obvious implications regarding democracy, surveillance, misinformation, etc.
From a society perspective, I'll take substance/alcohol abuse any day because it appears to be self-regulating at a level that while is higher than we'd like, is much lower than what it takes to destabilize society and democracy.
Smartphone addiction beats having cirrhosis.
Therapy's cheaper than a liver transplant.
Which is not to say that LSD can't potentially be harmful. Of course it can. But it's not very analogous to the typically destructive drugs (alcohol, amphetamines, strong opiates) and it's not going to mess with your dopamine the way they do.
And those should learn something from Syd Barret's life
Could had been a millionaire rock star, women, expensive toys, children. He could had everything for the rest of his life. But he choose LSD. As a lot of people claim, LSD is a cool and harmless funny drug, right?.
His life instead was: living in his mum house since 24 Yo, with his brain like a car crash, and all the time in the world to think on his boy room about how he managed to mess up his life so badly.
So thanks, but no way.
Those that can, do not agree that LSD was causative.
Syd was not the only person doing LSD in the 1960s, and if your argument boils down to "people with life-long major neurodivergence, who are living multiple years of extraordinarily stressful life, should not do huge amounts of psychedelic drugs" ... then OK! That's a good rule of thumb!
But the vast majority of people are not latent schizophrenics. And the vast majority of drug users could not approach Syd's consumption in quantity or duration.
So an argument from the same data is that occasional or even moderate use of LSD by almost every adult human, is perfectly safe.
...
Reframed: Every adult can make their own decisions about their personal level of risk tolerance. Hopefully the decision will be an informed one. Syd Barrett can be a huge terrifying red flag, or a bright illuminating green light, depending on the decisions you've made.
On one extreme of risk tolerance, you'd never leave the house. On the other extreme, (with some bad luck, some excellent luck, and a great deal of effort and resources!) you might approach Syd Barrett's lifestyle. Neither extreme is appropriate for most people.
COVID hit credulous / non-technical people harder, because they refused to believe in it and didn't take precautions. So a lot of people who might have turned to drugs died for an entirely unrelated reason, leaving teens who are "smart" enough to avoid drugs. ("Smart" here is not intended to mean just IQ.)