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So what do you think is going on? What changed after 2011? And what do you think would solve the problem?
To start, anytime I say 'kids', I mean kids, teens, and young adults. Also, this is not the entirety of the conversation, this is just the basics of my thoughts and observations.
How different were families back in the 60s and 70s compared to now?
Have you also noticed that more kids have food allergies, ADHD, 'mental illness', or other problems than they did back in the 60s and 70s?
When did it change from someone being home all the time to both parents working and having someone else raise their kid from infancy to adulthood?
When did we decide to accept some things in society that sends the wrong or confusing message to kids?
When did we start teaching kids that 'morals' are a bad thing, and we need to care only about ourselves and what we can get?
When did we start teaching kids that they 'deserve' everything, not 'work for' things?
When did parents start using electronics to babysit their kids?
When did we decide that kids needed access to phones and the entire internet 24/7?
When did the lines start to blur between reality and fabrication or over exaggeration?
When did kids stop placing value on life?
I am on the internet if I'm not working. (I mean for entertainment.) I grew up with computers, electronics, video games. When the internet came out, I was on one of the very first 'platforms'; however, I wasn't a child. I was a young adult.
I was on the internet before YouTube, before Facebook, Twitter, and all the others. We used ICQ, we had chat rooms, websites started popping up, we had messenger where we could talk to people we knew, and sometimes people we didn't, but it wasn't like today. We didn't have 'social media'. So, unless you were addicted to chat rooms, which were signs of bad things to come, you could be on the internet all by yourself the entire day, every day.
Now, we have kids who have access, 24/7, to the internet. That means that other people from all over the world, complete strangers, including predators, have access to them.
We have parents who can't seem to figure out what a bad idea that is because they don't care, are too absorbed in their own life or job/career, or are attentive parents with rules and consequences, but have no idea that when they take their kid's phone or laptop away, the kid has a burner phone.
Kids watch "YouTubers". Kids become 'fans' of celebrities on Instagram, Twitter (I don't think kids use Facebook), TikTok, etc, and they don't fully understand that what they see is not necessarily reality.
They see 'perfect lives' on Instagram, on YouTube, on other platforms. They see people on social media with huge followings, and they can't get more than 3 followers. So, they are dismissed as 'no one important'. Adults do the same thing. "That person only has X followers, so what they say or do means nothing."
They make comments on YouTubers' videos or celebrities' social media, hoping for attention, but rarely getting it. I noticed a rise in the last 3-4 years of people begging for likes on their comments, or thanking people for the likes 'OMGosh you guys! Thanks for the 50 likes! I've never had that many likes before!' They allow complete strangers to validate them. At the same time, if they don't get that validation, they feel ignored or rejected.
Twitter has taught people that you have to have a blue check mark by your name to be taken seriously. YouTube has taught that you need to have 100s of thousands up to millions of subscribers to be worth anything. Instagram has taught that you have to look perfect, take thousands of photos of your restaurant meal, go on vacation all the time, have fancy cars and clothes, or you're not worth anything.
Then you have TikTok - don't even get me started about that.
People want their fame. The younger generation definitely wants their fame. They aren't getting the attention that they need, at home, so they are looking for it from, as I said, complete strangers on the internet. And the problem is, they have NO idea who they are communicating with on the internet. What they might think is another 15 year old boy could be some 53 year old man in some European country.
It has also opened the door to 24/7 online bullying. They get picked on in school, they get picked on in text messages, they get humiliated online, people photoshop photos of them in an insulting way. The bullies have their friends that the kid doesn't even know piling up on the kid on social media.
I can tell you that around 2010, 2011, kids were telling others to "kill yourself" or "drink bleach" all over the internet. I remember a video of a young girl...12-14...hung herself from a tree in her backyard. She videoed it. Somehow it got online. People laughed. They were "glad" that she hung herself. Hate to say that I watched part of it because I didn't believe anyone was twisted enough to upload something that was real. Turns out it was real, and they didn't edit at all. Video starts in daytime. When I saw that she did actually hang herself, I went to the very last seconds of the video, just to see if she staged it. No. She didn't. It was now dusk, and she was still there - connected to the tree. Someone found the video on her phone, put it on the internet, and people celebrated her death in the comments.
If you ever wanted to know how blurred the line is between reality and fake, spend some time on YouTube. Real videos are mocked and fake ones believed. I can't even tell you how many videos that were clearly faked have fooled many, because they can't tell the difference between what is real and what isn't real.
Some examples: A bicyclist is chased by a grizzly bear. Faked. An Australian man runs towards a tornado in the desert (also known as a 'dust devil'). Faked. A swimmer dives off a cliff and runs into a shark. Faked. Yet, look at the comments - there is argument about is it fake or not.
Put up a video of a girl hanging herself, they don't think it's real, or don't care that it is. They enjoy watching people suffer.
The vast majority of those on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Omeagle, and many others are younger people. And the majority of them are completely unsupervised by their parents or guardians.
I believe it is a combination of destruction of the family, and this blur created by social media, and all kinds of platforms that their parents know nothing about.
We've basically dumped our kids off in front of the lion's den with no tools, no instruction or guidance, and have decided to allow the lions to 'babysit' the kids while parents do ...whatever it is that they think is more important than knowing what their kid sees, or who sees their kid.
And sometimes, complete strangers from anywhere in the world, or even their own classmates who have access to them all the time now, eat them alive. They will put terrible ideas in their heads, celebrate attacking others, and glorify extremely bad behavior.
It doesn't matter if you're dirt poor or wealthy - if you aren't paying attention to your kid, or you are, but unaware of the access that others have to your kids, in so many ways, someone else is going to 'raise your kid'.
To start, anytime I say 'kids', I mean kids, teens, and young adults. Also, this is not the entirety of the conversation, this is just the basics of my thoughts and observations.
How different were families back in the 60s and 70s compared to now?
Have you also noticed that more kids have food allergies, ADHD, 'mental illness', or other problems than they did back in the 60s and 70s?
When did it change from someone being home all the time to both parents working and having someone else raise their kid from infancy to adulthood?
When did we decide to accept some things in society that sends the wrong or confusing message to kids?
When did we start teaching kids that 'morals' are a bad thing, and we need to care only about ourselves and what we can get?
When did we start teaching kids that they 'deserve' everything, not 'work for' things?
When did parents start using electronics to babysit their kids?
When did we decide that kids needed access to phones and the entire internet 24/7?
When did the lines start to blur between reality and fabrication or over exaggeration?
When did kids stop placing value on life?
I am on the internet if I'm not working. (I mean for entertainment.) I grew up with computers, electronics, video games. When the internet came out, I was on one of the very first 'platforms'; however, I wasn't a child. I was a young adult.
I was on the internet before YouTube, before Facebook, Twitter, and all the others. We used ICQ, we had chat rooms, websites started popping up, we had messenger where we could talk to people we knew, and sometimes people we didn't, but it wasn't like today. We didn't have 'social media'. So, unless you were addicted to chat rooms, which were signs of bad things to come, you could be on the internet all by yourself the entire day, every day.
Now, we have kids who have access, 24/7, to the internet. That means that other people from all over the world, complete strangers, including predators, have access to them.
We have parents who can't seem to figure out what a bad idea that is because they don't care, are too absorbed in their own life or job/career, or are attentive parents with rules and consequences, but have no idea that when they take their kid's phone or laptop away, the kid has a burner phone.
Kids watch "YouTubers". Kids become 'fans' of celebrities on Instagram, Twitter (I don't think kids use Facebook), TikTok, etc, and they don't fully understand that what they see is not necessarily reality.
They see 'perfect lives' on Instagram, on YouTube, on other platforms. They see people on social media with huge followings, and they can't get more than 3 followers. So, they are dismissed as 'no one important'. Adults do the same thing. "That person only has X followers, so what they say or do means nothing."
They make comments on YouTubers' videos or celebrities' social media, hoping for attention, but rarely getting it. I noticed a rise in the last 3-4 years of people begging for likes on their comments, or thanking people for the likes 'OMGosh you guys! Thanks for the 50 likes! I've never had that many likes before!' They allow complete strangers to validate them. At the same time, if they don't get that validation, they feel ignored or rejected.
Twitter has taught people that you have to have a blue check mark by your name to be taken seriously. YouTube has taught that you need to have 100s of thousands up to millions of subscribers to be worth anything. Instagram has taught that you have to look perfect, take thousands of photos of your restaurant meal, go on vacation all the time, have fancy cars and clothes, or you're not worth anything.
Then you have TikTok - don't even get me started about that.
People want their fame. The younger generation definitely wants their fame. They aren't getting the attention that they need, at home, so they are looking for it from, as I said, complete strangers on the internet. And the problem is, they have NO idea who they are communicating with on the internet. What they might think is another 15 year old boy could be some 53 year old man in some European country.
It has also opened the door to 24/7 online bullying. They get picked on in school, they get picked on in text messages, they get humiliated online, people photoshop photos of them in an insulting way. The bullies have their friends that the kid doesn't even know piling up on the kid on social media.
I can tell you that around 2010, 2011, kids were telling others to "kill yourself" or "drink bleach" all over the internet. I remember a video of a young girl...12-14...hung herself from a tree in her backyard. She videoed it. Somehow it got online. People laughed. They were "glad" that she hung herself. Hate to say that I watched part of it because I didn't believe anyone was twisted enough to upload something that was real. Turns out it was real, and they didn't edit at all. Video starts in daytime. When I saw that she did actually hang herself, I went to the very last seconds of the video, just to see if she staged it. No. She didn't. It was now dusk, and she was still there - connected to the tree. Someone found the video on her phone, put it on the internet, and people celebrated her death in the comments.
If you ever wanted to know how blurred the line is between reality and fake, spend some time on YouTube. Real videos are mocked and fake ones believed. I can't even tell you how many videos that were clearly faked have fooled many, because they can't tell the difference between what is real and what isn't real.
Some examples: A bicyclist is chased by a grizzly bear. Faked. An Australian man runs towards a tornado in the desert (also known as a 'dust devil'). Faked. A swimmer dives off a cliff and runs into a shark. Faked. Yet, look at the comments - there is argument about is it fake or not.
Put up a video of a girl hanging herself, they don't think it's real, or don't care that it is. They enjoy watching people suffer.
The vast majority of those on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Omeagle, and many others are younger people. And the majority of them are completely unsupervised by their parents or guardians.
I believe it is a combination of destruction of the family, and this blur created by social media, and all kinds of platforms that their parents know nothing about.
We've basically dumped our kids off in front of the lion's den with no tools, no instruction or guidance, and have decided to allow the lions to 'babysit' the kids while parents do ...whatever it is that they think is more important than knowing what their kid sees, or who sees their kid.
And sometimes, complete strangers from anywhere in the world, or even their own classmates who have access to them all the time now, eat them alive. They will put terrible ideas in their heads, celebrate attacking others, and glorify extremely bad behavior.
It doesn't matter if you're dirt poor or wealthy - if you aren't paying attention to your kid, or you are, but unaware of the access that others have to your kids, in so many ways, someone else is going to 'raise your kid'.
Some good stuff in this post. I agree the internet (as a general thing and social media specifically) are not well understood by "adults" in terms of impact on human brain chemistry (more on that to follow). If you don't mind I will reply inline with thoughts/questions/ask for further information.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Three Wolves In Snow
How different were families back in the 60s and 70s compared to now?
When did it change from someone being home all the time to both parents working and having someone else raise their kid from infancy to adulthood?
You hit on the family a couple of times in your post, namely the destruction of it? Are you getting at divorce?
I would say I disagree with this aspect from this perspective. Divorce started spiking for Gen X kids/"LatchKey Kids" so this part of the theory seems to predate, by a lot, the breakdown we are seeing with younger kids. i.e. Gen X kids, other than Columbine(?), didnt seem to reach this outcome at levels approaching what we see today.
Further on this point, I would argue the following. Yes, all things being equal, a kid with two parents in the home gives the best hope for a positive outcome for the child. But if the two parents have a negative relationship between them, then having both works against the kid. Long story short, I don't root for divorce, divorce is sad. But merely "having both my parents at home" doesn't mean a positive outcome if home is a tension filled, angry place as a result. Happy parents can produce happier, well adjusted kids. Miserable parents almost never do.
I do agree the economics of today suck. Wages for the average worker havent kept up with productivity or inflation since the early 1970s. As such, its two parents working as the norm when it didn't used to be the case. My parents both worked my entire time living in the States (my mom couldn't work in Indonesia because there was only one work visa per family)
My wife stopped working when she was 6 months pregnant with our first. She started working again this year as both kids are now in school full time (and i WFH so I can get them off the bus). However there are tradeoffs to the choice we made. We traded financial benefits for "raising our kids".
Quote:
Originally Posted by Three Wolves In Snow
Have you also noticed that more kids have food allergies, ADHD, 'mental illness', or other problems than they did back in the 60s and 70s?
Ritalin was all over my MS/HS in Indonesia. My mom never understood it (she worked in the medical profession). "Why is everyone putting their kids on drugs for merely being a kid? Seems they just need to parent better".
The allergies thing I have never understood. No one when I was a kid had food allergies other than one kid I knew was allergic to shellfish. Further, I have a friend who has peanut allergies and is sensitive to gluten. However. She only has them when she is in the US. So if she is exposed to peanuts here, epipen. If she has gluten, her siliac fires up. But when she travels to other countries, she can eat peanuts and gluten reaction free.
I don't know what that means. But it wouldn't be a stretch for the US to allow stuff on the food which other "more serious countries" don't.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Three Wolves In Snow
When did we decide to accept some things in society that sends the wrong or confusing message to kids?
When did we start teaching kids that 'morals' are a bad thing, and we need to care only about ourselves and what we can get?
When did we start teaching kids that they 'deserve' everything, not 'work for' things?
When did parents start using electronics to babysit their kids?
When did we decide that kids needed access to phones and the entire internet 24/7?
When did the lines start to blur between reality and fabrication or over exaggeration?
When did kids stop placing value on life?
As for the morals, I actually feel like the olds have way less "care/empathy" than the kids these days. The olds (my dad is a boomer) are waaaaaaaaaaaay more "F you, I got mine" than people in my generation/younger are. It really isn't close. Yes the internet and social media provide bullying that didn't exist before, and that counts for something. But kids pick on kids and have for all time. I got jumped by a "gang" in my MS at a school event. They beat the **** out of me in front of probably 300 kids and parents during a school carnival. I didn't seek out revenge. I didn't consider harming them. I used it as a opportunity for growth and reflection.
We are an instant gratification society and social media makes that way worse.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Three Wolves In Snow
I am on the internet if I'm not working. (I mean for entertainment.) I grew up with computers, electronics, video games. When the internet came out, I was on one of the very first 'platforms'; however, I wasn't a child. I was a young adult.
I was on the internet before YouTube, before Facebook, Twitter, and all the others. We used ICQ, we had chat rooms, websites started popping up, we had messenger where we could talk to people we knew, and sometimes people we didn't, but it wasn't like today. We didn't have 'social media'. So, unless you were addicted to chat rooms, which were signs of bad things to come, you could be on the internet all by yourself the entire day, every day.
Now, we have kids who have access, 24/7, to the internet. That means that other people from all over the world, complete strangers, including predators, have access to them.
We have parents who can't seem to figure out what a bad idea that is because they don't care, are too absorbed in their own life or job/career, or are attentive parents with rules and consequences, but have no idea that when they take their kid's phone or laptop away, the kid has a burner phone.
Kids watch "YouTubers". Kids become 'fans' of celebrities on Instagram, Twitter (I don't think kids use Facebook), TikTok, etc, and they don't fully understand that what they see is not necessarily reality.
They see 'perfect lives' on Instagram, on YouTube, on other platforms. They see people on social media with huge followings, and they can't get more than 3 followers. So, they are dismissed as 'no one important'. Adults do the same thing. "That person only has X followers, so what they say or do means nothing."
They make comments on YouTubers' videos or celebrities' social media, hoping for attention, but rarely getting it. I noticed a rise in the last 3-4 years of people begging for likes on their comments, or thanking people for the likes 'OMGosh you guys! Thanks for the 50 likes! I've never had that many likes before!' They allow complete strangers to validate them. At the same time, if they don't get that validation, they feel ignored or rejected.
Twitter has taught people that you have to have a blue check mark by your name to be taken seriously. YouTube has taught that you need to have 100s of thousands up to millions of subscribers to be worth anything. Instagram has taught that you have to look perfect, take thousands of photos of your restaurant meal, go on vacation all the time, have fancy cars and clothes, or you're not worth anything.
Then you have TikTok - don't even get me started about that.
People want their fame. The younger generation definitely wants their fame. They aren't getting the attention that they need, at home, so they are looking for it from, as I said, complete strangers on the internet. And the problem is, they have NO idea who they are communicating with on the internet. What they might think is another 15 year old boy could be some 53 year old man in some European country.
It has also opened the door to 24/7 online bullying. They get picked on in school, they get picked on in text messages, they get humiliated online, people photoshop photos of them in an insulting way. The bullies have their friends that the kid doesn't even know piling up on the kid on social media.
I can tell you that around 2010, 2011, kids were telling others to "kill yourself" or "drink bleach" all over the internet. I remember a video of a young girl...12-14...hung herself from a tree in her backyard. She videoed it. Somehow it got online. People laughed. They were "glad" that she hung herself. Hate to say that I watched part of it because I didn't believe anyone was twisted enough to upload something that was real. Turns out it was real, and they didn't edit at all. Video starts in daytime. When I saw that she did actually hang herself, I went to the very last seconds of the video, just to see if she staged it. No. She didn't. It was now dusk, and she was still there - connected to the tree. Someone found the video on her phone, put it on the internet, and people celebrated her death in the comments.
If you ever wanted to know how blurred the line is between reality and fake, spend some time on YouTube. Real videos are mocked and fake ones believed. I can't even tell you how many videos that were clearly faked have fooled many, because they can't tell the difference between what is real and what isn't real.
Some examples: A bicyclist is chased by a grizzly bear. Faked. An Australian man runs towards a tornado in the desert (also known as a 'dust devil'). Faked. A swimmer dives off a cliff and runs into a shark. Faked. Yet, look at the comments - there is argument about is it fake or not.
Put up a video of a girl hanging herself, they don't think it's real, or don't care that it is. They enjoy watching people suffer.
The vast majority of those on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Omeagle, and many others are younger people. And the majority of them are completely unsupervised by their parents or guardians.
I believe it is a combination of destruction of the family, and this blur created by social media, and all kinds of platforms that their parents know nothing about.
We've basically dumped our kids off in front of the lion's den with no tools, no instruction or guidance, and have decided to allow the lions to 'babysit' the kids while parents do ...whatever it is that they think is more important than knowing what their kid sees, or who sees their kid.
And sometimes, complete strangers from anywhere in the world, or even their own classmates who have access to them all the time now, eat them alive. They will put terrible ideas in their heads, celebrate attacking others, and glorify extremely bad behavior.
It doesn't matter if you're dirt poor or wealthy - if you aren't paying attention to your kid, or you are, but unaware of the access that others have to your kids, in so many ways, someone else is going to 'raise your kid'.
I think the general theme I'll go with here is what I call "the ill equipped parent". I have said it before and I will say it to the day I die, if you were an adult when the internet showed up, short of working in tech, you have no real idea how the internet can impact a human brain; good and bad.
We live in a country where the average age of our political class is the oldest of any developed country. The key players in the House and Senate are in their 70s, 80s. Grassley and Feinstein are almost 90. POTUS is what, 80 next month? What other "profession" in this country has such a skewed age cohort?
I am not trying to old bash. I am asking the question of relate-ability and understanding from a policy perspective because here is the massive consequence. The internet, especially the social media side (and your point gets to this) is sinister in what it does to human brain physiology. In many cases, it does to a human brain what drugs do or gambling does. When you get that like on your post, here's some dopamine. More followers? Dopamine. A celebrity engaged with you (lawd help us with our celebrity fetish....talk about a collective group of people who should have zero hero worship but thats another topic all to itself), Dopamine. It F's with brain chemistry and people, in general, either don't get it or don't care. We regulate what kids have access to. They can't vote, they can't buy a gun. They can't buy cigarettes. They can't buy alcohol. They can't buy porn. They can't play keno/powerball/mega millions or scratch tickets....but they are given in many cases free reign to the internet and social media without a second thought. Chuck Grassley couldn't even understand how Facebook makes money....yet he's supposed to understand the impact Facebook/social media has on young people who have to battle with social growth stresses in their analog lives on top of their digital ones?
Like you I came of age early in the internet era. I too was on ICQ in MS/HS. Then came AIM. I joined Facebook in 2003 (in college, when you had to be at a College that was invited to join and have a college email address). Facebook then was a way to connect with people in your class (my Accounting 101 class Sophomore year had 650 kids in it, Facebook helped connect us). Facebook is not that anymore. Its a negative/grievance enforcing tool and frankly it (and social media in general) give a voice to everyone, even if they really shouldn't have one. 30 years ago, your crazy drunk uncle was just your crazy drunk uncle. Nowadays he has a following on his social media channels and gets to espouse his craziness to the world. I'd argue the world was better when he was just my crazy drunk uncle who could yell at the clouds after a few cold pops at the SeaWitch.
I do agree with you the internet has a huge impact on what we are seeing. For all the good sharing knowledge should have been, the dark underbelly of it has never been taken on (in the name of Capitalism). It creates echo chambers of negativity which young people simply don't have the coping mechanisms to deal with. Put that on repeat enough, then get it at school, and a disengaged family life and that train is on the tracks to these outcomes. ****, even adults have a hard time coping with social media. How many times do we hear about Facebook in divorce court cases? Yet we expect our kids to handle it?
In closing, I agree with much of your post. We just weren't ready as a species for what the digital age was going to unleash. We needed guardrails, we needed the adults "to get it" and there really wasn't a fair expectation that they would, so its been the wild wild west and kids getting destroyed (and then destroying other people) has become an offshoot of the problem.
I don't know what the solves are. I work in "Data Monitization". My livelihood is directly impacted by more regulation on how data is captured, leveraged and utilized. But you won't find someone more pro "Digital Bill of Rights" than I am. Europe is decades ahead of us and they aren't close to where we should be. As such, I don't think this problem goes away any time soon. This problem; ill equipped society, a society whose entire goal is focus on profit, screw the human, plus access to firearms (there are what, 1.3 guns for every man, woman and child in this country?) creates a toxic brew which explodes from time to time.
The Netflix documentary about Woodstock '99 gives a really good taste for what I am talking about. Breakdown of humanity, the chase of every last cent for profit creates a "Lord of the Flies" environment. That event should have stirred us to ask what was happening. That event was 23 years ago and we are further down the rabbit hole now than we were then. Sorta like Altamont and the Manson Murders ended the "innocence of the Hippie era" Woodstock '99 was a watershed moment where I think with the passage of time sociologists will point to it as a "crossing the rubicon" moment.
Some good stuff in this post. I agree the internet (as a general thing and social media specifically) are not well understood by "adults" in terms of impact on human brain chemistry (more on that to follow). If you don't mind I will reply inline with thoughts/questions/ask for further information.
You hit on the family a couple of times in your post, namely the destruction of it? Are you getting at divorce?
I would say I disagree with this aspect from this perspective. Divorce started spiking for Gen X kids/"LatchKey Kids" so this part of the theory seems to predate, by a lot, the breakdown we are seeing with younger kids. i.e. Gen X kids, other than Columbine(?), didnt seem to reach this outcome at levels approaching what we see today.
Further on this point, I would argue the following. Yes, all things being equal, a kid with two parents in the home gives the best hope for a positive outcome for the child. But if the two parents have a negative relationship between them, then having both works against the kid. Long story short, I don't root for divorce, divorce is sad. But merely "having both my parents at home" doesn't mean a positive outcome if home is a tension filled, angry place as a result. Happy parents can produce happier, well adjusted kids. Miserable parents almost never do.
I do agree the economics of today suck. Wages for the average worker havent kept up with productivity or inflation since the early 1970s. As such, its two parents working as the norm when it didn't used to be the case. My parents both worked my entire time living in the States (my mom couldn't work in Indonesia because there was only one work visa per family)
My wife stopped working when she was 6 months pregnant with our first. She started working again this year as both kids are now in school full time (and i WFH so I can get them off the bus). However there are tradeoffs to the choice we made. We traded financial benefits for "raising our kids".
Ritalin was all over my MS/HS in Indonesia. My mom never understood it (she worked in the medical profession). "Why is everyone putting their kids on drugs for merely being a kid? Seems they just need to parent better".
The allergies thing I have never understood. No one when I was a kid had food allergies other than one kid I knew was allergic to shellfish. Further, I have a friend who has peanut allergies and is sensitive to gluten. However. She only has them when she is in the US. So if she is exposed to peanuts here, epipen. If she has gluten, her siliac fires up. But when she travels to other countries, she can eat peanuts and gluten reaction free.
I don't know what that means. But it wouldn't be a stretch for the US to allow stuff on the food which other "more serious countries" don't.
As for the morals, I actually feel like the olds have way less "care/empathy" than the kids these days. The olds (my dad is a boomer) are waaaaaaaaaaaay more "F you, I got mine" than people in my generation/younger are. It really isn't close.
We are an instant gratification society and social media makes that way worse.
I think the general theme I'll go with here is what I call "the ill equipped parent". I have said it before and I will say it to the day I die, if you were an adult when the internet showed up, short of working in tech, you have no real idea how the internet can impact a human brain; good and bad.
We live in a country where the average age of our political class is the oldest of any developed country. The key players in the House and Senate are in their 70s, 80s. Grassley and Feinstein are almost 90. POTUS is what, 80 next month? What other "profession" in this country has such a skewed age cohort?
I am not trying to odd bash. I am asking the question of relate-ability and understanding from a policy perspective because here is the massive consequence. The internet, especially the social media side (and your point gets to this) is sinister in what it does to human brain physiology. In many cases, it does to a human brain what drugs do or gambling does. When you get that like on your post, here's some dopamine. More followers? Dopamine. A celebrity engaged with you (lawd help us with our celebrity fetish....talk about a collective group of people who should have zero hero worship but thats another topic all to itself), Dopamine. It F's with brain chemistry and people, in general, either don't get it or don't care. We regulate what kids have access to. They can't vote, they can't buy a gun. They can't by cigarettes. They can't buy alcohol. They can't buy porn. They can't play keno/powerball/mega millions or scratch tickets....but they are given in many cases free reign to the internet and social media without a second thought. Chuck Grassley couldn't even understand how Facebook makes money....yet he's supposed to understand the impact Facebook/social media has on young people who have to battle with social growth stresses in their analog lives on top of their digital ones?
Like you I came of age early in the internet era. I too was on ICQ in MS/HS. Then came AIM. I joined Facebook in 2003 (in college, when you had to be at a College that was invited to join and have a college email address). Facebook then was a way to connect with people in your class (my Accounting 101 class Sophomore year had 650 kids in it, Facebook helped connect us). Facebook is not that anymore. Its a negative/grievance enforcing tool and frankly it (and social media in general) give a voice to everyone, even if they really shouldn't have one. 30 years ago, your crazy drunk uncle was just your crazy drunk uncle. Nowadays he has a following on his social media channels and gets to espouse his craziness to the world. I'd argue the world was better when he was just my crazy drunk uncle who could yell at the clouds after a few cold pops at the SeaWitch.
I do agree with you the internet has a huge impact on what we are seeing. For all the good sharing knowledge should have been, the dark underbelly of it has never been taken on (in the name of Capitalism). It creates echo chambers of negativity which young people simply don't have the coping mechanisms to deal with. Put that on repeat enough, then get it at school, and a disengaged family life and that train is on the tracks to these outcomes. ****, even adults have a hard time coping with social media. How many times do we hear about Facebook in divorce court cases? Yet we expect our kids to handle it?
In closing, I agree with much of your post. We just weren't ready as a species for what the digital age was going to unleash. We needed guardrails, we needed the adults "to get it" and there really wasn't a fair expectation that they would, so its been the wild wild west and kids getting destroyed (and then destroying other people) has become an offshoot of the problem.
I don't know what the solves are. I work in "Data Monitization". My livelihood is directly impacted by more regulation on how data is captured, leveraged and utilized. But you won't find someone more pro "Digital Bill of Rights" than I am. Europe is decades ahead of us and they aren't close to where we should be. As such, I don't think this problem goes away any time soon. This problem; ill equipped society, a society whose entire goal is focus on profit, screw the human, plus access to firearms (there are what, 1.3 guns for every man, woman and child in this country?) creates a toxic brew which explodes from time to time.
The Netflix documentary about Woodstock '99 gives a really good taste for what I am talking about. Breakdown of humanity, the chase of every last cent for profit creates a "Lord of the Flies" environment. That event should have stirred us to ask what was happening. That event was 23 years ago and we are further down the rabbit hole than we were then. Sorta like Altamont and the Manson Murders ended the "innocence of the Hippie era" Woodstock '99 was a watershed moment where I think with the passage of time sociologists will point to it as a "crossing the rubicon" moment.
I've avoided commenting on this thread until now as while it is a very unfortunate local story; it was clear it would devolve into a thread that would end up belonging more in the "P & OC" section of C-D where critical thinking and civil discourse goes to die.....
That being said; this is a very thorough, concise, and well-thought-out post. Excellent points.
I've avoided commenting on this thread until now as while it is a very unfortunate local story; it was clear it would devolve into a thread that would end up belonging more in the "P & OC" section of C-D where critical thinking and civil discourse goes to die.....
That being said; this is a very thorough, concise, and well-thought-out post. Excellent points.
I admittedly am trying to thread the needle of being relevant to the discussion without going P&OC cesspool. This topic has massive societal undertones and politics is society. I'm trying to balance
I do agree with you the internet has a huge impact on what we are seeing. For all the good sharing knowledge should have been, the dark underbelly of it has never been taken on (in the name of Capitalism). It creates echo chambers of negativity which young people simply don't have the coping mechanisms to deal with. Put that on repeat enough, then get it at school, and a disengaged family life and that train is on the tracks to these outcomes. ****, even adults have a hard time coping with social media. How many times do we hear about Facebook in divorce court cases? Yet we expect our kids to handle it?
In closing, I agree with much of your post. We just weren't ready as a species for what the digital age was going to unleash. We needed guardrails, we needed the adults "to get it" and there really wasn't a fair expectation that they would, so its been the wild wild west and kids getting destroyed (and then destroying other people) has become an offshoot of the problem.
I don't know what the solves are. I work in "Data Monitization". My livelihood is directly impacted by more regulation on how data is captured, leveraged and utilized. But you won't find someone more pro "Digital Bill of Rights" than I am. Europe is decades ahead of us and they aren't close to where we should be. As such, I don't think this problem goes away any time soon. This problem; ill equipped society, a society whose entire goal is focus on profit, screw the human, plus access to firearms (there are what, 1.3 guns for every man, woman and child in this country?) creates a toxic brew which explodes from time to time.
Sadly, I don't think there are any solves, at least not any realistic ones. As with guns, there are powerful forces at play and lots of money involved all on top of the American ideals of freedom and individual rights. I don't see a groundswell of support to do anything meaningful as a society about either issue. The focus seems to just be on telling individuals to do better (how very American!)...lock your guns, pay more attention to your kids, etc. So far, that doesn't seem to be keeping these things from happening and it likely never will.
Sadly, I don't think there are any solves, at least not any realistic ones. As with guns, there are powerful forces at play and lots of money involved all on top of the American ideals of freedom and individual rights. I don't see a groundswell of support to do anything meaningful as a society about either issue. The focus seems to just be on telling individuals to do better (how very American!)...lock your guns, pay more attention to your kids, etc. So far, that doesn't seem to be keeping these things from happening and it likely never will.
I agree with you. I don't think there are real solves available (as hard as it is for me to type that). Our society is as broken as our body politic is, and I am on record two years ago stating here where I think that ends (and someone called me crazy for the opinion; who knows maybe I am ).
And its broken in many ways but the general undercurrent across the "many ways" is a huge chunk of this country don't see our communities as a system that ensures our success. There are evolutionary reasons why ancient humans formed societies instead of keeping in the hunter gather system. There are reasons why tribes formed. The whole was greater than the sum of the parts. There are also reasons why individuals were cast out of those tribes and societies and left to fend for themselves and more than likely get eaten in the jungle. Its literally the evolutionary source for anxiety and our fight or flight reflex.
Nihilism, a general unhappiness of people in their lives (be it "boredom" or fear of the other) leads to some dark ass stuff. Sprinkle in the money you refer when you got MuskStans and TheilStans parroting the talking points of people who will literally take their billions to a mega yacht the second their view of the world comes to pass, leaving all of those who can't escape the human experience because of means, to devolve into some MadMax dystopian sci fi real life where we fight over water and land because we got nothing left. You can adhere to the "Ill do me, and you do you" ideals all you want, but there are reason human systems have never succeeded in that model. There's a reason why the "off the grid types" in Idaho aren't exactly prime examples of American Success (unless you judge Jim Jones types as a success)
ETA - I named Musk and Thiel by name, but the point applies across the spectrum. I believe it was David Geffen (hardly a Rightwing personality) who spent most of the Pandemic on a super yacht in the middle of the ocean. My point is simply that our country follows the money and the money enables people to remove themselves from the impact of their view.
"Yes I think we should have no social safety nets" they say aloud.....while keeping the quiet part quiet...."because I don't want to pay for something I will never use".
I only bring this up to inform you that I am extremely well traveled and I know the people and the culture of our nation very well. The harsh truth is that America does have a gun culture. With respect to the gun culture, what is the best way to deal with an aggressive attacker? Be the first to draw your gun or just know how to talk to people with some respect? Most of us understand that showing respect is the best way to solve that problem and the gun is the last resort, but does the average 15-year-old think that way? There's a reason why the minimum age to obtain a CDL is 18 and the minimum age in which to cross state lines with a CDL is 21. THERE'S A REASON!!!
We have dirt and gravel roads here. You ain't seen a place like this. My 11 year old has a Glock and is prepared to use it. Driving a truck through wont show you what is underneath the covers. Firearms are necessary - enjoy life with other people taking care of you - we choose not to live that way.
We have dirt and gravel roads here. You ain't seen a place like this. My 11 year old has a Glock and is prepared to use it. Driving a truck through wont show you what is underneath the covers. Firearms are necessary - enjoy life with other people taking care of you - we choose not to live that way.
Ha. The passive aggressiveness, self righteous bull****erry in that line is astounding.
Sir, this is an Arby's. You live in NW IN an hour or two from South Bend, Ft. Wayne and Chicago. You aren't living on Easter Island. My dad's family is from Randolph Co. IL...I'm well aware how rural an area can be.
Ha. The passive aggressiveness, self righteousness bull****erry in that line is astounding.
Sir, this is an Arby's. You live in NW IN an hour or two from South Bend, Ft. Wayne and Chicago. You aren't living on Easter Island. My dad's family is from Randolph Co. IL...I'm well aware how rural an area can be.
The only thing I can say is to test it, Medaryville, IN - walk around like you talk watch what happens. You won't though, deep down you know better. Your dad's family - lol.
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