This is a bit off topic but I was wondering if you could do a write up to explain why Canadas GDP per capita growth has been so terrible over the past 10 years or so. Especially while the United States is going through unprecedented growth.
Growth depends on productivity. Society becomes less productive if it wastes trillions in the inefficient green economy and other woke ideologies detached from science.
Green communism sucked 200 trillion from taxpayers:
Pllllleeeeease, on my knees, don’t believe me, just do your own homework by searching the following in yandex.com, mojeek.com (includes crawl date filter and substack search), gigablast.com, startpage.com, duckduckgo.com (not Google, Bing, Yahoo censors). The key terms to test them? Child Satanic Ritual Abuse, Child Satanic Ritual Murder.
If you are a mason or know a mason, ask him to ask his 33° master to put in writing and sign it, who is "the great architect" and that he is not Lucifer. If he refuses, then he’ll know who he is really serving, Satan: tell him to get out of masonry NOW. Sooner or later he’ll be required to trample on a cross to get to a higher degree.
President John Quincy Adams: “Masonry ought forever to be abolished. It is wrong - essentially wrong - a seed of evil, which can never produce any good.”
Confessions of a former mason (Serge Abad-Gallardo):
The best way to have a real dialogue about vaccines being weaponized to handicap, infertilize and murder the “over-population” is to start with vaccine contamination: nobody could be in favor of contaminated pharmaceuticals.
1. Carcinogen SV40 in Oral Polio Vaccine: they knew it since the 60s but kept distributing it even until 2016 !!!
2. hCG in vaccines to infertilize women detected since the 90s: still going on
3. Thimerosal, aluminum, Mono-sodium Glutamate (MSG) and other NEUROTOXINS
4. Heavy metals
5. Human DNA 2000% in excess of FDA 10 ng limit (main driver towards brain damage like autism/asperger/ticks, leukemia and non-Hodgkin cancer), probably related to point 7 below.
6. Graphene oxide in Flu and COVID shots but now with anything injectable (even dentist anesthesia, hospital IV, etc.).
7. Carcinogenic SV40 genomic sequences and double-stranded DNA in mRNA COVID shots: the hacked DNA in the cell doesn’t stop producing the poison when the cell dies, but its descent continue the poisoning until the haccinated casualty dies.
8. Bluetooth nano-routers injected with COVID vaccines and inserted with swabs (which explains why they rejected the cheaper non-invasive saliva test).
Proof of criminal intent:
Points 7 and 8
Censoring and blocking 30+ COVID cures
Labeling the most lethal batches with a lethal code (howbad.info)
Blocking the real knowledge of effectiveness v. "adverse event" rate
That proves:
A. There's zero Government control
B. There's zero Manufacturer liability
C. There's zero Media coverage
D. All that, during decades and still going on, not only with vaccines but also with medicines, food&beverage additives, etc. Everything, even institutions have been weaponized!
E. There's zero political action to stop that (except RFK2 in the USA)
A school buddy told me "I know you make sense but if I recognize it's true, I won't be able to enjoy life anymore".
I was curious to see Twenge single out non-graduates as a group affected by depression, after all the headlines about poor mental health among liberals, who I assume are more likely to have degrees. This suggests a more complex picture than the media paints.
It appears to be a don't-confuse-correlation-with-causation problem. There are also other biases that need to be attenuated, like the availability heuristic and survivorship bias.
We do know liberals have poor mental health because we set out to look for data that show it. The big problem in mental health is that there is so much more poor mental health in other populations that goes undiagnosed.
There are cost barriers. Lower-income individuals might not have insurance to get mental health care, or there's a lack of free or low-cost options in their communities (clinics or employers' EAPs). Lower-income individuals might not be able to have the time to go to in-person therapy or take time off from work.
Cultural and trust barriers are another big factor. Does a person's race or ethnicity stigmatize mental illness? Does a person's belief system imply a supernatural cause for mental illness (e.g., "demons")?
Also, is depression externally triggered or internally? Material deprivation is a very big cause of mental illness; poverty is as harmful as the most addictive of drugs. It can be chemical (alcohol and drugs). It can be from socialization -- what style of parenting did you receive and who were your peers, and how much were you alienated by them? It can also be neurochemical, where your body's functioning creates disorder.
I think this goes for the generational stuff too. We didn’t have all of these labels back in the day. I’m pretty sure “childhood trauma” caused me to be “depressed” and “ADHD”. I was just considered “difficult” back then and was treated with discipline (more trauma) rather than medication. I kinda turned out OK but may other GenX-ers didn’t. I’m not disagreeing with what the doctor is saying but it has to be hard to get good data. My grandparents grew up dealing with the depression and World War 2. That had to be worse than Instagram.
I am unable to give the details on this, but I was listening to a podcast with a historian who published a book researching the effect on what happens after the warriors come home from a war. She noted that a decade after a period of war, the overall crime rate, divorces, domestic violence, and drug and alcohol abuse all start to rise and stay at high levels for about a decade.
She found this pattern in the U.S. with World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, with the memory of the middle to late 20th century as one of out-of-control crime and the breakdown of the nuclear family.
She did find a similar pattern in France in World War II and during the colonial wars of independence in the decades after it.
Persuasive points - thanks. I'll throw in my intuition, also, that liberal girls are more likely to talk about their complex feelings and perhaps it's even fashionable in those circles to be 'fragile'.
As much as I appreciate Dr. Twenge's work, the person who has driven this at an advocacy level in the last few years is Jonathon Haidt. He also runs a substack for those interested in this topic. As Dr. Twenge hints at here, Haidt has found that social media alone didn't cause depression; smartphones alone didn't do it;, and even the combination didn't do it for all teens. (Teenage boys don't have this problem significantly, which if you know anything about men and women, isn't really that surprising.) However, for teenage girls, the "24/7 social media in your pocket" has been devastating. He has spent multiple years studying this and has reams of data on it.
The data is rock solid on this. If you are a parent, do not get your child a smartphone and do not permit social media. Period. Full stop. To those worried that your teen will be "left out", I suggest being left out from the always-online social group is probably a good thing for her.
And here's a revolutionary idea: it's probably good for you too. One of the best ways to enforce this is for your teen to see you giving up your smartphone. I dumped mine 3 years ago when my oldest was 13. I think more clearly, have better relationships, and pay just $30 a YEAR for my phone now. Give it a try. Buy a cheap dumb phone for your carrier on eBay, drop your SIM card into it for a month, and see what happens.
I'd agree with parents not letting children on social media. I'd also scale that up. I think children shouldn't permit their parents to be on social media. :)
I've come to the conclusion that social media is unsafe at any age. My first contact with social media was Usenet newsgroups through AOL. So in the '90s, I found the internet to be fresh and exhilarating and so much fun. I used AOL so much, in the days when use was metered by the hour I would exceed my budget and lose access for weeks. But then when AOL went to a flat monthly fee, it stopped being fun. Then it was boring. Then I started feeling miserable because almost all discussions ended up in flame wars, or trolling and shitposting.
I didn't miss it. I got on Twitter about 12 years ago, and being an AOL/Usenet veteran I didn't set my expectations high. I didn't get on MySpace or Facebook because I didn't want my life to be an open book and found no need for it. One of the best decisions I ever made.
With Twitter, I saw the trouble signs early. At 140 characters, you can't really say anything meaningful, and according to Twitter's folkways that if you do get replied to it's a bad thing. It's called the ratio. So that's one sign the incentive structure was broken. Then there was the Main Character, where some person says or does something that causes the whole world to pile on them. The worst aspect of it, though, was the politics.
So my Twitter feed was more about weeding, getting maga Twitter and scold Twitter (lefties) off my timelines, but what was left was not worth reading. Especially since everyone felt the need to express themselves with memes. Memes, memes everywhere.
I left years before Elon bought it, and happier and wiser by disengaging. This time it taught me to just not bother with social media because the worst people will be rewarded for the worst behavior because of the incentives structure of attention and the lack of consequences.
Substack only works because there's a cost. When you make talking back cost (even a tiny bit) it's amazing how many people decide they don't have much to say.
I've had very similar experiences over the years. Although, I was an early Facebook user, but ultimately left the platform when my feed became more news and commentary than friends and family updates about their lives. Twitter can also be a bit of a minefield when it comes to political / social discussions so it was helpful to mute the more extreme voices on both ends of the spectrum. And now, like you, tend to avoid social media, and feel I’m more grounded and happier as a result of avoiding (ignoring?) the toxicity, FOMO inducing, chest thumping, postering ones typical feed quickly becomes.
Obviously, Substack is different haha. All kidding aside, I think the incentive structure on Twitter or Instagram or Tiktok that's designed for mass consumption is to discourage deep, nuanced discussion in favor of surface-level simplistic takes and recycled memes. It's lots of people chasing the algorithm and borrowed creativity.
I've seen so many parents on their smartphones when they could have been interacting with their kids. I read an interview where kids said they felt like they were boring, because their parents weren't interested in them, only their phones.
I see people doing this all the time with other people around, and it drives me crazy, because I find it so rude. Someone will be speaking to someone and people can't be bothered to put their phone down and give the person who's speaking to them their undivided attention.
What really chaps my hide is the babies. You see toddlers staring at tablets and smartphones. I had 3 babies/toddlers all at one time (my 3 kids are less than 3 years apart) so I really do understand the need for "here, honey, play this game for 3 minutes while I deal with your sister's projectile vomiting". And you know what, even though I'm a Luddite, I did that occasionally too. It was very rare, and I got concerned when my oldest starting asking to play games on my phone when there was downtime when we were out. That was a bright-red, "this thing is addictive!" flag.
What pushed me over the edge to dump my smartphone was 2 things:
1) The documentaries Citizen 4 and The Social Dilemma. If you haven't watched these, they are absolutely worth getting from your library.
2) A friend of a friend was having lunch in New York with someone from the Czech Republic. Both men had Android smartphones. In his cab after lunch, he pulled out his phone to check his messages. On his weather app was the weather not only for Manhattan (where he was) but for Prague. He's never been to Prague. He hadn't been Googling anything about Prague. But he did just finish lunch with someone from Prague.
I'd been thinking about it for a number of years, but that last one was freaky enough that it pushed me over the edge. I had a dumb phone within 2 months and have never looked back.
Yeah, I hate to see devices become babysitters. There will be a price for that.
I had a similar experience recently of someone saying she wanted a piece of chocolate cake, and next thing you know there was an ad on Facebook featuring a perfect slice of chocolate cake. Not sure how that happened. Maybe your phone and your friend's phone were communicating somehow?
I don't suspect it's listening, but it might be. More likely is just that Google data mines everything, including real time location. Some algorithm determined that he had spent more than an hour at a restaurant less than 6 ft away from someone from Prague and therefore he might be interested in the weather in Prague. It makes complete sense, but if you carry it to it's logical conclusion, it's pretty terrifying.
Basic rule for the digital era: if you didn't pay for it, you're not the customer; you're the product. I choose not to be the product.
I reallyy don't understand this either, because crime is so much lower than in the past, but this is all evidence to me of how much social media and smartphones and network news make you afraid of the world, because of the constant negative news incentive to keep people watching or on the platforms.
As a late-model Gen Xer, I've noticed one big difference in how we were socialized as youths to those who came after us.
Millennials and later were taught to think with their feelings, their own and others around them. It might be the psychological equivalent of the data effect, that if you find some statistic to show bad something is, things look worse than they appear because we're actually looking for it now. If there's a vocabulary for negative feelings, people will feel more negative because they can identify with it.
Fascinating interview, Noah. A couple of tidbits, though, that I'd dispute:
>>So we're really just debating whether we should group people into somewhat arbitrary 15- to 20-year blocks of birth years or not. If we didn't, though, it would be very difficult to discuss or research differences based on birth year.<<
I think it's far from clear it would be difficult to "discuss or research differences based on birth year" if we replaced the highly arbitrary (they're not "somewhat" arbitrary!) year blocks with other (preferably shorter and/or ad hoc) increments, eg "people born during the late 40s" or "people who were in high school during Reagan years" or what have you. Or if full-scale replacement isn't feasible, at least consider *trying out* other forms of generational description from time to time. Granularity is good!
>Yes, there is plenty of variation within generations, but that doesn't negate the differences between generations.<<
It doesn't negate them, but it often renders them substantially useless. Let me give an example: I'm six years younger, I believe, than Barack Obama. And twenty years younger than Bill Clinton. But because Barack and Bill are one one side of an imaginary generational boundary, and I'm on the other, the implication is that the historical/cultural influences on Obama's development have more in common with Bill Clinton's than with mine. But that seems crazy. Obama and I both experienced being children in the 1970s!
I don't disagree with the notion that we need to engage in cohort grouping for various purposes. There's zero doubt of that. I'm just underwhelmed by the supposed relevance of these fixed demarcations. They're not merely arbitrary; they're also too lengthy (5-7 years works a lot better for most purposes). There's nothing wrong with keeping the focus a bit narrower, and using whatever works (ie, ad hoc boundary-drawing, depending on the purpose), eg. "children born in the late 1940s" or "adults who were in high school when Obama was president" or "people who were young children when 911 happened" or what have you.
I'm under no illusions we're going to jettison the current, inane M.O. for talking about generations any time soon. But I believe such discussions would be more meaningful and insightful if we could.
What would legislation requiring an age verification for social media even look like? I’ve heard this idea before but I always have a hard time picturing it
It seems Google and some other big tech firms successfully lobbied for exemptions, which probably ruins the law since it lacks "content neutrality". Hopefully some other state will get it right and offer a fair test of the policy.
Techdirt, a tech news site, says the two most common age-verification gates proposed will either involve a telephone call center or some scanning of a government-issued photo ID, like a driver's license.
The Techdirt writers and community are opposed to these laws and highlight the practical problems with age-verification enforcement. For the call center version, parents or some other adult will just go ahead and get their kids verified and give them permission to use the service. Or, the kids will just find the parents' access codes and log on anyway and do what they're going to do. For the ID version, a child can easily finagle an adult ID and gain verification. Or, like the call center, an adult will do the work to get the child verified.
What the Techdirt community hates even more is the crappy consumer data privacy protections that come about because of these laws. Because tech companies will face an undue burden of hiring call center workers and creating a compliance center, they come out hard against any provision that prohibits them from mining (and trading on) any data they gain from age verification. Same thing with ID data mining, and the vendors that provide the ID scanning process have often been hit with data breaches.
Jean mentions we are polarized by "class" and I have observed that many blue collar or pink collar workers are not very interested in new technologies other than social media. I have mentioned that we are creating the class struggle again from the beginning of the industrial age where a few "robber barons" accumulated vast wealth while the "serf" simply traded dead end agrarian labor jobs for even harsher factory labor indenture. Are we creating a new "technocracy" with a few rich tech bro barons and masses of digital serfs reduced to iterate gig labor with no benefits or stability. Is ownership of technology the new entrée to nobility?
Gen Z's moving away from relationships is mostly an outcome of low self-esteem, few social interactions, unemployment, higher education/housing costs (debts), availability of an unlimited sex pool, especially for women, mental health issues, over-availability of information leading to ever-evolving desires of life and mates, infidelity, trust issues and what not. In simple words, Gen Zs don't have money or an idea of what they actually want in their lives. They want everything perfect. It's like they are chasing a unicorn, unaware of how to make a meaningful long-lasting human connection, -- and people inclined toward individualism don't behave that way. There is legal biasedness, especially towards men and other economic developments are also the reasons why people don't see any benefits in these things anymore.
I know women who wish they had not allowed their middle school age daughters get on social media and a daughter glad she has not allowed any of her teenage kids get on social media period. Her kids still had and have friends. I like the recommendation to require teens to be at least 16 to get on social media sites and require proof of age.
I know women who wish they had not allowed their middle school age daughters get on social media and a daughter glad she has not allowed any of her teenage kids get on social media period. Her kids still had and have friends. I like the recommendation to require teens to be at least 16 to get on social media sites and require proof of age.
I know women who wish they had not allowed their middle school age daughters get on social media and a daughter glad she has not allowed any of her teenage kids get on social media period. Her kids still had and have friends. I like the recommendation to require teens to be at least 16 to get on social media sites and require proof of age.
Yup, Millennials started moving away from Bernie when their median income rose dramatically in 2015. The year before his first presidential run. Which makes about as much sense as the generation that graduated into the great recession (which multiple studies have demonstrated leaves a generational scarring effect decreasing annual salary by 5-10% for as long as 20 years) e.g. https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2018/01/24/a-dream-deferred-inequality-and-poverty-across-generations-in-europe ) with far more debt and worse job prospects, magically turning that around (in like 5 years?) and outpace sing other generations. All while less and less wealth has been accumulating to anyone besides the very richest. There is zero doubt in my mind that whatever data source you are getting that from is intentionally obfuscating reality.
I'd say the depression onset has at least a plausible relation to Bernie. Depression was a reasonable response to watching our supposedly free press bend over backwards to excuse HRC's warmongering imperialism, faux feminism that only care about PMC women, and subservience to Wall Street. We saw all the top news organizations just flat out lie about Sanders; calling Sanders and his supporters racists based on strong arguments like her being a Goldwater Girl while he was in SNCC, and her calling black people super predators while he was giving impassioned speeches about harmful The crime bill was going to be for poor black people. Yeah, I’d say it was depressing realizing that both political parties actively want to harm as many of their constituents as possible to be of better service to their donors. That NYT WaPo and MSNBC have exactly as much integrity and credibility as Fox News does. And worst of all, the whole worthless corrupt system has completely insulated itself from any and all reforms. We have redefined democracy down to the ability to nominally select iif we would like your decreased wages, poor job prospects, deference to any and all billionaires, increasing homelessness, worsening climate change, and unlimited support for endless wars with or without a side of explicit racism.
If social media use is causing emotional and social problems in teens, then shouldn't we be able to measure a lagged decline in countries where there was later adoption of social media and smartphones? This seems like the sort of test that should be possible with the large surveys and data sets that Twenge works with.
This is a bit off topic but I was wondering if you could do a write up to explain why Canadas GDP per capita growth has been so terrible over the past 10 years or so. Especially while the United States is going through unprecedented growth.
I'm going to back-of-the-envelope guess it's because Americans are working relatively more hours than Canadians, and the gap has grown over time.
GDP per hour worked: https://data.oecd.org/chart/7aOJ
GDP per capita: https://data.oecd.org/chart/7aOK
Growth depends on productivity. Society becomes less productive if it wastes trillions in the inefficient green economy and other woke ideologies detached from science.
Green communism sucked 200 trillion from taxpayers:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/best-scientific-sources-to-debunk
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/killing-me-softly-with-green-songs
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/carbon-reparations
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/climate-deaths
And there's another factor: the injection of billions in counterfeited currency due to masons.
Confessions of ex-illuminati Ronald Bernard (all lodges obey the same master, Satan):
http://youtu.be/JAhnCdXqPww
Now, are you really ready for this?:
The full PLAN exposed:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-plan-revealed
16 laws we need to exit Prison Planet
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/laws-to-exit-planet-prison
Pllllleeeeease, on my knees, don’t believe me, just do your own homework by searching the following in yandex.com, mojeek.com (includes crawl date filter and substack search), gigablast.com, startpage.com, duckduckgo.com (not Google, Bing, Yahoo censors). The key terms to test them? Child Satanic Ritual Abuse, Child Satanic Ritual Murder.
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/rpn5aj/i_have_found_the_perfect_uncensored_search_engines/
https://www.deepwebsiteslinks.com/uncensored-search-engines-for-anonymous-searching/
If you are a mason or know a mason, ask him to ask his 33° master to put in writing and sign it, who is "the great architect" and that he is not Lucifer. If he refuses, then he’ll know who he is really serving, Satan: tell him to get out of masonry NOW. Sooner or later he’ll be required to trample on a cross to get to a higher degree.
President John Quincy Adams: “Masonry ought forever to be abolished. It is wrong - essentially wrong - a seed of evil, which can never produce any good.”
Confessions of a former mason (Serge Abad-Gallardo):
https://www.ncregister.com/interview/confessions-of-a-former-freemason-officer-converted-to-catholicism
Confessions of ex-illuminati Ronald Bernard (all lodges obey the same master, Satan):
http://youtu.be/JAhnCdXqPww
Confession of 33rd degree master mason - Masons worship deities/demons
https://rumble.com/v294ksc-words-from-33rd-degree-master-mason-rare-video-masons-worship-all-sorts-of-.html
Masonry's Satanic Connection
https://odysee.com/@HiddenTruths:c/Masonry's-Satanic-Connection:4
Masonry's Satanic Doctrine | From Their Own Books
https://rumble.com/v2wg24a-masonrys-satanic-doctrine-from-their-own-books.html
Do Freemasons Worship Lucifer？ Evidence They Don't Want You To See
https://odysee.com/@John_4-14:a/Do-Freemasons-Worship-Lucifer%EF%BC%9F-Evidence-They-Don't-Want-You-To-See-%EF%BD%9C-Hidden-Agendas---Walter-Veith:0
Satanic Ritual Abuse and Secret Societies [1995] [VHS]
https://odysee.com/@thisworldworks:1/satanic-ritual-abuse-and-secret-societies-1995:3
Satanic Pedophilia Torture and Blood - Dark Satanic Secrets Revealed
https://odysee.com/@Gmail.com:52/822821884_Satanic-Pedophilia-Torture-and-Blood---Dark-Satanic-Secrets-Revealed:4
UNITED NATIONS LUCIFER AND THE LUCIFER TRUST
https://odysee.com/@dynosarus:c/UNITED-NATIONS-LUCIFER-AND-THE-LUCIFER-TRUST:4
The best way to have a real dialogue about vaccines being weaponized to handicap, infertilize and murder the “over-population” is to start with vaccine contamination: nobody could be in favor of contaminated pharmaceuticals.
1. Carcinogen SV40 in Oral Polio Vaccine: they knew it since the 60s but kept distributing it even until 2016 !!!
2. hCG in vaccines to infertilize women detected since the 90s: still going on
3. Thimerosal, aluminum, Mono-sodium Glutamate (MSG) and other NEUROTOXINS
4. Heavy metals
5. Human DNA 2000% in excess of FDA 10 ng limit (main driver towards brain damage like autism/asperger/ticks, leukemia and non-Hodgkin cancer), probably related to point 7 below.
6. Graphene oxide in Flu and COVID shots but now with anything injectable (even dentist anesthesia, hospital IV, etc.).
7. Carcinogenic SV40 genomic sequences and double-stranded DNA in mRNA COVID shots: the hacked DNA in the cell doesn’t stop producing the poison when the cell dies, but its descent continue the poisoning until the haccinated casualty dies.
8. Bluetooth nano-routers injected with COVID vaccines and inserted with swabs (which explains why they rejected the cheaper non-invasive saliva test).
Proof of criminal intent:
Points 7 and 8
Censoring and blocking 30+ COVID cures
Labeling the most lethal batches with a lethal code (howbad.info)
Blocking the real knowledge of effectiveness v. "adverse event" rate
That proves:
A. There's zero Government control
B. There's zero Manufacturer liability
C. There's zero Media coverage
D. All that, during decades and still going on, not only with vaccines but also with medicines, food&beverage additives, etc. Everything, even institutions have been weaponized!
E. There's zero political action to stop that (except RFK2 in the USA)
A school buddy told me "I know you make sense but if I recognize it's true, I won't be able to enjoy life anymore".
16 laws we need to exit Extermination Planet
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/laws-to-exit-planet-prison
If we don’t succeed, they’ll succeed with their 6-sword lethal plan fully exposed here:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-plan-revealed
Change goes in hand with the number of awakened! Thank you for sharing this to save lives!
I was curious to see Twenge single out non-graduates as a group affected by depression, after all the headlines about poor mental health among liberals, who I assume are more likely to have degrees. This suggests a more complex picture than the media paints.
It appears to be a don't-confuse-correlation-with-causation problem. There are also other biases that need to be attenuated, like the availability heuristic and survivorship bias.
We do know liberals have poor mental health because we set out to look for data that show it. The big problem in mental health is that there is so much more poor mental health in other populations that goes undiagnosed.
There are cost barriers. Lower-income individuals might not have insurance to get mental health care, or there's a lack of free or low-cost options in their communities (clinics or employers' EAPs). Lower-income individuals might not be able to have the time to go to in-person therapy or take time off from work.
Cultural and trust barriers are another big factor. Does a person's race or ethnicity stigmatize mental illness? Does a person's belief system imply a supernatural cause for mental illness (e.g., "demons")?
Also, is depression externally triggered or internally? Material deprivation is a very big cause of mental illness; poverty is as harmful as the most addictive of drugs. It can be chemical (alcohol and drugs). It can be from socialization -- what style of parenting did you receive and who were your peers, and how much were you alienated by them? It can also be neurochemical, where your body's functioning creates disorder.
I think this goes for the generational stuff too. We didn’t have all of these labels back in the day. I’m pretty sure “childhood trauma” caused me to be “depressed” and “ADHD”. I was just considered “difficult” back then and was treated with discipline (more trauma) rather than medication. I kinda turned out OK but may other GenX-ers didn’t. I’m not disagreeing with what the doctor is saying but it has to be hard to get good data. My grandparents grew up dealing with the depression and World War 2. That had to be worse than Instagram.
World War II for sure.
I am unable to give the details on this, but I was listening to a podcast with a historian who published a book researching the effect on what happens after the warriors come home from a war. She noted that a decade after a period of war, the overall crime rate, divorces, domestic violence, and drug and alcohol abuse all start to rise and stay at high levels for about a decade.
She found this pattern in the U.S. with World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, with the memory of the middle to late 20th century as one of out-of-control crime and the breakdown of the nuclear family.
She did find a similar pattern in France in World War II and during the colonial wars of independence in the decades after it.
Persuasive points - thanks. I'll throw in my intuition, also, that liberal girls are more likely to talk about their complex feelings and perhaps it's even fashionable in those circles to be 'fragile'.
Appreciated your insights here.
Excellent work Dr. Twenge.
As much as I appreciate Dr. Twenge's work, the person who has driven this at an advocacy level in the last few years is Jonathon Haidt. He also runs a substack for those interested in this topic. As Dr. Twenge hints at here, Haidt has found that social media alone didn't cause depression; smartphones alone didn't do it;, and even the combination didn't do it for all teens. (Teenage boys don't have this problem significantly, which if you know anything about men and women, isn't really that surprising.) However, for teenage girls, the "24/7 social media in your pocket" has been devastating. He has spent multiple years studying this and has reams of data on it.
The data is rock solid on this. If you are a parent, do not get your child a smartphone and do not permit social media. Period. Full stop. To those worried that your teen will be "left out", I suggest being left out from the always-online social group is probably a good thing for her.
And here's a revolutionary idea: it's probably good for you too. One of the best ways to enforce this is for your teen to see you giving up your smartphone. I dumped mine 3 years ago when my oldest was 13. I think more clearly, have better relationships, and pay just $30 a YEAR for my phone now. Give it a try. Buy a cheap dumb phone for your carrier on eBay, drop your SIM card into it for a month, and see what happens.
I'd agree with parents not letting children on social media. I'd also scale that up. I think children shouldn't permit their parents to be on social media. :)
I've come to the conclusion that social media is unsafe at any age. My first contact with social media was Usenet newsgroups through AOL. So in the '90s, I found the internet to be fresh and exhilarating and so much fun. I used AOL so much, in the days when use was metered by the hour I would exceed my budget and lose access for weeks. But then when AOL went to a flat monthly fee, it stopped being fun. Then it was boring. Then I started feeling miserable because almost all discussions ended up in flame wars, or trolling and shitposting.
I didn't miss it. I got on Twitter about 12 years ago, and being an AOL/Usenet veteran I didn't set my expectations high. I didn't get on MySpace or Facebook because I didn't want my life to be an open book and found no need for it. One of the best decisions I ever made.
With Twitter, I saw the trouble signs early. At 140 characters, you can't really say anything meaningful, and according to Twitter's folkways that if you do get replied to it's a bad thing. It's called the ratio. So that's one sign the incentive structure was broken. Then there was the Main Character, where some person says or does something that causes the whole world to pile on them. The worst aspect of it, though, was the politics.
So my Twitter feed was more about weeding, getting maga Twitter and scold Twitter (lefties) off my timelines, but what was left was not worth reading. Especially since everyone felt the need to express themselves with memes. Memes, memes everywhere.
I left years before Elon bought it, and happier and wiser by disengaging. This time it taught me to just not bother with social media because the worst people will be rewarded for the worst behavior because of the incentives structure of attention and the lack of consequences.
Substack only works because there's a cost. When you make talking back cost (even a tiny bit) it's amazing how many people decide they don't have much to say.
I've had very similar experiences over the years. Although, I was an early Facebook user, but ultimately left the platform when my feed became more news and commentary than friends and family updates about their lives. Twitter can also be a bit of a minefield when it comes to political / social discussions so it was helpful to mute the more extreme voices on both ends of the spectrum. And now, like you, tend to avoid social media, and feel I’m more grounded and happier as a result of avoiding (ignoring?) the toxicity, FOMO inducing, chest thumping, postering ones typical feed quickly becomes.
Obviously, Substack is different haha. All kidding aside, I think the incentive structure on Twitter or Instagram or Tiktok that's designed for mass consumption is to discourage deep, nuanced discussion in favor of surface-level simplistic takes and recycled memes. It's lots of people chasing the algorithm and borrowed creativity.
I've seen so many parents on their smartphones when they could have been interacting with their kids. I read an interview where kids said they felt like they were boring, because their parents weren't interested in them, only their phones.
I see people doing this all the time with other people around, and it drives me crazy, because I find it so rude. Someone will be speaking to someone and people can't be bothered to put their phone down and give the person who's speaking to them their undivided attention.
What really chaps my hide is the babies. You see toddlers staring at tablets and smartphones. I had 3 babies/toddlers all at one time (my 3 kids are less than 3 years apart) so I really do understand the need for "here, honey, play this game for 3 minutes while I deal with your sister's projectile vomiting". And you know what, even though I'm a Luddite, I did that occasionally too. It was very rare, and I got concerned when my oldest starting asking to play games on my phone when there was downtime when we were out. That was a bright-red, "this thing is addictive!" flag.
What pushed me over the edge to dump my smartphone was 2 things:
1) The documentaries Citizen 4 and The Social Dilemma. If you haven't watched these, they are absolutely worth getting from your library.
2) A friend of a friend was having lunch in New York with someone from the Czech Republic. Both men had Android smartphones. In his cab after lunch, he pulled out his phone to check his messages. On his weather app was the weather not only for Manhattan (where he was) but for Prague. He's never been to Prague. He hadn't been Googling anything about Prague. But he did just finish lunch with someone from Prague.
I'd been thinking about it for a number of years, but that last one was freaky enough that it pushed me over the edge. I had a dumb phone within 2 months and have never looked back.
Yeah, I hate to see devices become babysitters. There will be a price for that.
I had a similar experience recently of someone saying she wanted a piece of chocolate cake, and next thing you know there was an ad on Facebook featuring a perfect slice of chocolate cake. Not sure how that happened. Maybe your phone and your friend's phone were communicating somehow?
I mean your friend's phone and his friend's phone
I don't suspect it's listening, but it might be. More likely is just that Google data mines everything, including real time location. Some algorithm determined that he had spent more than an hour at a restaurant less than 6 ft away from someone from Prague and therefore he might be interested in the weather in Prague. It makes complete sense, but if you carry it to it's logical conclusion, it's pretty terrifying.
Basic rule for the digital era: if you didn't pay for it, you're not the customer; you're the product. I choose not to be the product.
Haidt also talks about the loss of free play as a factor in teen mental health.
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-play-deficit
Makes sense that there would be more than one factor.
I reallyy don't understand this either, because crime is so much lower than in the past, but this is all evidence to me of how much social media and smartphones and network news make you afraid of the world, because of the constant negative news incentive to keep people watching or on the platforms.
As a late-model Gen Xer, I've noticed one big difference in how we were socialized as youths to those who came after us.
Millennials and later were taught to think with their feelings, their own and others around them. It might be the psychological equivalent of the data effect, that if you find some statistic to show bad something is, things look worse than they appear because we're actually looking for it now. If there's a vocabulary for negative feelings, people will feel more negative because they can identify with it.
Fascinating interview, Noah. A couple of tidbits, though, that I'd dispute:
>>So we're really just debating whether we should group people into somewhat arbitrary 15- to 20-year blocks of birth years or not. If we didn't, though, it would be very difficult to discuss or research differences based on birth year.<<
I think it's far from clear it would be difficult to "discuss or research differences based on birth year" if we replaced the highly arbitrary (they're not "somewhat" arbitrary!) year blocks with other (preferably shorter and/or ad hoc) increments, eg "people born during the late 40s" or "people who were in high school during Reagan years" or what have you. Or if full-scale replacement isn't feasible, at least consider *trying out* other forms of generational description from time to time. Granularity is good!
>Yes, there is plenty of variation within generations, but that doesn't negate the differences between generations.<<
It doesn't negate them, but it often renders them substantially useless. Let me give an example: I'm six years younger, I believe, than Barack Obama. And twenty years younger than Bill Clinton. But because Barack and Bill are one one side of an imaginary generational boundary, and I'm on the other, the implication is that the historical/cultural influences on Obama's development have more in common with Bill Clinton's than with mine. But that seems crazy. Obama and I both experienced being children in the 1970s!
I don't disagree with the notion that we need to engage in cohort grouping for various purposes. There's zero doubt of that. I'm just underwhelmed by the supposed relevance of these fixed demarcations. They're not merely arbitrary; they're also too lengthy (5-7 years works a lot better for most purposes). There's nothing wrong with keeping the focus a bit narrower, and using whatever works (ie, ad hoc boundary-drawing, depending on the purpose), eg. "children born in the late 1940s" or "adults who were in high school when Obama was president" or "people who were young children when 911 happened" or what have you.
I'm under no illusions we're going to jettison the current, inane M.O. for talking about generations any time soon. But I believe such discussions would be more meaningful and insightful if we could.
What would legislation requiring an age verification for social media even look like? I’ve heard this idea before but I always have a hard time picturing it
Arkansas has passed ane age-verification mandate but it's probably going to be thrown out in court:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/01/business/arkansas-social-media-age-verification/index.html
It seems Google and some other big tech firms successfully lobbied for exemptions, which probably ruins the law since it lacks "content neutrality". Hopefully some other state will get it right and offer a fair test of the policy.
Techdirt, a tech news site, says the two most common age-verification gates proposed will either involve a telephone call center or some scanning of a government-issued photo ID, like a driver's license.
The Techdirt writers and community are opposed to these laws and highlight the practical problems with age-verification enforcement. For the call center version, parents or some other adult will just go ahead and get their kids verified and give them permission to use the service. Or, the kids will just find the parents' access codes and log on anyway and do what they're going to do. For the ID version, a child can easily finagle an adult ID and gain verification. Or, like the call center, an adult will do the work to get the child verified.
What the Techdirt community hates even more is the crappy consumer data privacy protections that come about because of these laws. Because tech companies will face an undue burden of hiring call center workers and creating a compliance center, they come out hard against any provision that prohibits them from mining (and trading on) any data they gain from age verification. Same thing with ID data mining, and the vendors that provide the ID scanning process have often been hit with data breaches.
Jean mentions we are polarized by "class" and I have observed that many blue collar or pink collar workers are not very interested in new technologies other than social media. I have mentioned that we are creating the class struggle again from the beginning of the industrial age where a few "robber barons" accumulated vast wealth while the "serf" simply traded dead end agrarian labor jobs for even harsher factory labor indenture. Are we creating a new "technocracy" with a few rich tech bro barons and masses of digital serfs reduced to iterate gig labor with no benefits or stability. Is ownership of technology the new entrée to nobility?
Gen Z's moving away from relationships is mostly an outcome of low self-esteem, few social interactions, unemployment, higher education/housing costs (debts), availability of an unlimited sex pool, especially for women, mental health issues, over-availability of information leading to ever-evolving desires of life and mates, infidelity, trust issues and what not. In simple words, Gen Zs don't have money or an idea of what they actually want in their lives. They want everything perfect. It's like they are chasing a unicorn, unaware of how to make a meaningful long-lasting human connection, -- and people inclined toward individualism don't behave that way. There is legal biasedness, especially towards men and other economic developments are also the reasons why people don't see any benefits in these things anymore.
Does individualism teach that you don't need other people to make you happy?
I think I'm an individualist, but that is some bullshit.
I know women who wish they had not allowed their middle school age daughters get on social media and a daughter glad she has not allowed any of her teenage kids get on social media period. Her kids still had and have friends. I like the recommendation to require teens to be at least 16 to get on social media sites and require proof of age.
I know women who wish they had not allowed their middle school age daughters get on social media and a daughter glad she has not allowed any of her teenage kids get on social media period. Her kids still had and have friends. I like the recommendation to require teens to be at least 16 to get on social media sites and require proof of age.
I know women who wish they had not allowed their middle school age daughters get on social media and a daughter glad she has not allowed any of her teenage kids get on social media period. Her kids still had and have friends. I like the recommendation to require teens to be at least 16 to get on social media sites and require proof of age.
Yup, Millennials started moving away from Bernie when their median income rose dramatically in 2015. The year before his first presidential run. Which makes about as much sense as the generation that graduated into the great recession (which multiple studies have demonstrated leaves a generational scarring effect decreasing annual salary by 5-10% for as long as 20 years) e.g. https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2018/01/24/a-dream-deferred-inequality-and-poverty-across-generations-in-europe ) with far more debt and worse job prospects, magically turning that around (in like 5 years?) and outpace sing other generations. All while less and less wealth has been accumulating to anyone besides the very richest. There is zero doubt in my mind that whatever data source you are getting that from is intentionally obfuscating reality.
I'd say the depression onset has at least a plausible relation to Bernie. Depression was a reasonable response to watching our supposedly free press bend over backwards to excuse HRC's warmongering imperialism, faux feminism that only care about PMC women, and subservience to Wall Street. We saw all the top news organizations just flat out lie about Sanders; calling Sanders and his supporters racists based on strong arguments like her being a Goldwater Girl while he was in SNCC, and her calling black people super predators while he was giving impassioned speeches about harmful The crime bill was going to be for poor black people. Yeah, I’d say it was depressing realizing that both political parties actively want to harm as many of their constituents as possible to be of better service to their donors. That NYT WaPo and MSNBC have exactly as much integrity and credibility as Fox News does. And worst of all, the whole worthless corrupt system has completely insulated itself from any and all reforms. We have redefined democracy down to the ability to nominally select iif we would like your decreased wages, poor job prospects, deference to any and all billionaires, increasing homelessness, worsening climate change, and unlimited support for endless wars with or without a side of explicit racism.
If social media use is causing emotional and social problems in teens, then shouldn't we be able to measure a lagged decline in countries where there was later adoption of social media and smartphones? This seems like the sort of test that should be possible with the large surveys and data sets that Twenge works with.
Incredible discussion. Thanks for sharing!