Young people and anxiety

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lpm
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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by lpm » Wed Jul 13, 2022 1:02 pm

The argument that young people today are anxious due to economics is testable. We are currently in a rare few years when living standards are falling. Another such period was the 1970s. Living standards today are double the 1970s, but it could be the feeling of stagnation or economic failure that leads to anxiety. Were 70s young people a bunch of whining snowflakes?

The geographical question could also give evidence - were young people in the earlier 1980s more anxious in the north than the south?

My guess is evidence would indicate a weak or non existent link between anxiety in young people and a troubled economy. And that it's not social media.

My guess is that it's demographics. The early 20s are at a bit of a population dip in the west, and young people are now a bigger minority than ever before in the aging population. They feel out of place in the world, when in previous decades young people were powerful in numbers and felt the world belonged to them.

It's interesting how young people seem obsessed with age categories, endlessly going on about boomers and gen X and all the other lumpen mass b.llsh.t. They appear to emphasise grouping by age, whereas previous generations might emphasise grouping by class, race, gender or gender.
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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by Opti » Wed Jul 13, 2022 1:14 pm

lpm wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 1:02 pm
... Were 70s young people a bunch of whining snowflakes? ...

Well, we were righteously pissed off into the 80s. And moaned about it a lot. Then again, we always had the option of renting a cheap room ... or squatting. Job mobility was easier. And the dole was easy to get. And we were able to demonstrate and riot ... and we did. A lot.
Time for a big fat one.

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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by plodder » Wed Jul 13, 2022 1:22 pm

Opti wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 1:14 pm
lpm wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 1:02 pm
... Were 70s young people a bunch of whining snowflakes? ...

Well, we were righteously pissed off into the 80s. And moaned about it a lot. Then again, we always had the option of renting a cheap room ... or squatting. Job mobility was easier. And the dole was easy to get. And we were able to demonstrate and riot ... and we did. A lot.
Right. But this is a teenage rebel thing, not a mainstream thing. Cheap rooms are hard to come by, it's hard to doss about on the dole, squatting is much more tricky. I think we've definitely removed some important safety valves for teenage rebels, but it's now absolutely mainstream (from my perspective) to regularly talk and think about mental health.

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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by Opti » Wed Jul 13, 2022 1:25 pm

I wasn't a teenager for very long in the 70s, by the 80s I was in my 30s.
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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by plodder » Wed Jul 13, 2022 1:30 pm

Opti wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 1:25 pm
I wasn't a teenager for very long in the 70s, by the 80s I was in my 30s.
You were a teenage rebel throughout that entire period, only slowing down briefly in the 90s.

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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by lpm » Wed Jul 13, 2022 1:44 pm

So this comes back to demographics. Young people were the cultural force in the 1963 to 1983 era, with the playrights angry at youth powerlessness in the 50s replaced by Beatlemania, then Vietnam peace protests, Stonewall, hippies and counterculture, then punk and 80s riots and Boy George challenging gender stereotypes. If you wanted to be in a minority youth culture, a goth say, you could meet in person countless other goths.

Young people had the numbers, and combined with their energy they made their agenda a mainstream thing.

Then it faded away. Young person power diminished, as illustrated by the arrival of student loans in the UK in the 1990s. There is little power for young people now, due simply to their lack of numbers.

If anxiety is more common, and I think it is, and mental health is a top issue, then in my opinion it must come from one of the great drivers of human events: economics, technology and demographics. I don't think it's economics because I suspect it began well before the 2008 crash and young people are relatively far richer. I don't think it's technology, despite that being the channel for the major interaction young people have. Which leaves demographics.
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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by tom p » Wed Jul 13, 2022 1:55 pm

lpm wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 1:44 pm
So this comes back to demographics. Young people were the cultural force in the 1963 to 1983 era, with the playrights angry at youth powerlessness in the 50s replaced by Beatlemania, then Vietnam peace protests, Stonewall, hippies and counterculture, then punk and 80s riots and Boy George challenging gender stereotypes. If you wanted to be in a minority youth culture, a goth say, you could meet in person countless other goths.

Young people had the numbers, and combined with their energy they made their agenda a mainstream thing.

Then it faded away. Young person power diminished, as illustrated by the arrival of student loans in the UK in the 1990s. There is little power for young people now, due simply to their lack of numbers.

If anxiety is more common, and I think it is, and mental health is a top issue, then in my opinion it must come from one of the great drivers of human events: economics, technology and demographics. I don't think it's economics because I suspect it began well before the 2008 crash and young people are relatively far richer. I don't think it's technology, despite that being the channel for the major interaction young people have. Which leaves demographics.
Once again, that statement is bollocks.
Young people are poorer now than they have been for quite a while.

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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by lpm » Wed Jul 13, 2022 1:57 pm

You are factually incorrect and resorted to writing crap about house prices instead of housing costs.
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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by plodder » Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:01 pm

lpm wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 1:44 pm
So this comes back to demographics. Young people were the cultural force in the 1963 to 1983 era, with the playrights angry at youth powerlessness in the 50s replaced by Beatlemania, then Vietnam peace protests, Stonewall, hippies and counterculture, then punk and 80s riots and Boy George challenging gender stereotypes. If you wanted to be in a minority youth culture, a goth say, you could meet in person countless other goths.

Young people had the numbers, and combined with their energy they made their agenda a mainstream thing.

Then it faded away. Young person power diminished, as illustrated by the arrival of student loans in the UK in the 1990s. There is little power for young people now, due simply to their lack of numbers.

If anxiety is more common, and I think it is, and mental health is a top issue, then in my opinion it must come from one of the great drivers of human events: economics, technology and demographics. I don't think it's economics because I suspect it began well before the 2008 crash and young people are relatively far richer. I don't think it's technology, despite that being the channel for the major interaction young people have. Which leaves demographics.
Fun. Increased life expectancy means more old people older for longer, young uns less important. Good to see some stats but makes sense.

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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by tom p » Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:03 pm

lpm wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 1:57 pm
You are factually incorrect and resorted to writing crap about house prices instead of housing costs.
House prices & rental costs & average wages actually - all demonstrated that housing is a higher proportion of income for anyone who doesn't already own their own home. Learn to read.

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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by lpm » Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:19 pm

And incomes are far higher. A higher proportion of higher income is what leaves young people with money for a car and holidays. Learn to use basic maths.

The economic reality is that if you were born in the UK in the early 1960s you'd come of age in the early 1980s - and be likely to go straight into youth unemployment. It was 20%. What d'you reckon the chances of buying your own home in your 20s or early 30s was when you started your working life with extended unemployment?

I suspect your instinctive rejection of basic facts is due confusing relative with absolute. The spending power of the old today is very high, in previous generations it was very low - partly due to poverty level pensions and partly because life expectancy killed off pensioners early anyway. Because the old have such higher incomes it feels to you like young people are poorer than before, even though their standard of living is unambiguously much higher in absolute terms.

Plus young people are far better educated, have amazing technology and are in a world much more tolerant about sexuality or life choices.

On absolute economic measures young people have nothing to be anxious about, despite being in the middle of one of those bad spells for the economy.
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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:26 pm

Young people had worse mental health outcomes during the pandemic, perhaps because they were disproportionately affected by uncertainty with education and employment https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy ... -84e143e5/

They are also more affected by eco-anxiety:
Demographic characteristics of vulnerable groups

Our findings found that four of the nine included studies focused on youth experiences and their emerging concerns for climate change [18,20,22,23]. Clayton [18] highlighted that children are more vulnerable to climate change's mental health effects as they have stronger responses to extreme weather events like PTSD, depression, and sleep disorders. Younger participants (18–35 years) reported higher scores than older adults when reporting on the degree of climate anxiety impacting their ability to function [20]. Similarly, females and those in younger age groups were more distressed overall about climate change than males and those over the age of 35 years [23].
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 8221000444

Maybe some anxiety stems from concerns about the future, rather than comparisons with the past?
We have the right to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment.

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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by lpm » Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:32 pm

Snowflake generation to mean "less resilient and more prone to taking offence" entered the dictionary in 2016.

I'm sure the pandemic didn't help, but this question over anxiety is deeper seated than a couple of years of the ups and downs of the economy.
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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:39 pm

Yes, I think it's more likely to be from decades of environmental breakdown, algorithmic intrusion and a general sense of uncertainty given the knowledge that the current paradigm can't last.

Ash on my balcony from a forest fire up the road as I write this.
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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by plodder » Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:41 pm

Calling young people on the phone is seen as a direct assault on their personal space, even at work, communication needs to be done via messenger / instant chat for it to be non-intrusive. Or maybe that's just me. This feels like a pretty fundamental change in the way people engage with each other and the world.

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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by plodder » Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:41 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:39 pm
Yes, I think it's more likely to be from decades of environmental breakdown, algorithmic intrusion and a general sense of uncertainty given the knowledge that the current paradigm can't last.

Ash on my balcony from a forest fire up the road as I write this.
Mate honestly as kids we got taught to lean a door against the wall to hide under with our canned goods for when the bomb dropped.

eta plus also you may not have noticed but people >30 years old are also living in the same world as you and are probably even more disillusioned about how it can be fixed.

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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:53 pm

plodder wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:41 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:39 pm
Yes, I think it's more likely to be from decades of environmental breakdown, algorithmic intrusion and a general sense of uncertainty given the knowledge that the current paradigm can't last.

Ash on my balcony from a forest fire up the road as I write this.
Mate honestly as kids we got taught to lean a door against the wall to hide under with our canned goods for when the bomb dropped.
Didn't drop though, did it? Talk to people who've watched bombs falling around them and ask whether it made them anxious.
plodder wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:41 pm
eta plus also you may not have noticed but people >30 years old are also living in the same world as you and are probably even more disillusioned about how it can be fixed.
Yes, it is odd that older people seem less concerned. Maybe their less flexible brains are just less capable at adjusting to new information?
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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by plodder » Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:56 pm

It could be that, or we could be less anxious for cultural reasons.

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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by plodder » Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:59 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:53 pm
plodder wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:41 pm
[
Mate honestly as kids we got taught to lean a door against the wall to hide under with our canned goods for when the bomb dropped.
Didn't drop though, did it? Talk to people who've watched bombs falling around them and ask whether it made them anxious.
No one knew that at the time.

The +4 degrees doomsday stuff won't happen for a few years yet - what we're seeing at the moment is extreme weather happening a bit more often. So I don't really accept the distinction.

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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by bagpuss » Wed Jul 13, 2022 3:21 pm

I think there are 3 aspects to the apparent increase in levels of anxiety in young people today. All contribute to it but I don't think anyone really knows how much each contributes. They've all been talked about on the thread already but just to reiterate, as the argument seems to be going off down a rabbit hole of whether young people have it worse today than when we were lads and lasses.

1. Actual tangible(ish) stuff really is worse for them, or at least, more worrying.
Climate change and the fear of what is to come when the world's leaders hopelessly fail to get to grips with what's needed to be done. Nuclear war was big and scary but irreversible climate change is a heck of a lot bigger and scarier in many ways, perhaps because it seems pretty inevitable whereas nuclear was just an ever-present maybe. The bagkitten told me so in no uncertain terms last year. We had a talk about what scares her and what scared me at her age and I can tell you now, her list was a good bit longer and scarier and not just because she's more of a worrier than I was. And she doesn't have the first clue about any economic issues she's going to face later, plus this was before Putin invaded Ukraine - I think that would be another one for her list now.

2. Pressures are more intense and harder to avoid. There's less headspace, less ability to escape from the crap.
Mainly thanks to social media and increased ease of communication, it's much much harder to escape a lot of stresses now than it was when we were younger. When I was a kid, I was teased remorselessly, to the level of bullying at times, but when I was at home, I escaped it all. I could go out with my friends or family, or stay at home all day, and none of those bullies could invade my bubble. There's little escape from it now, or at least you can only escape by cutting yourself off from social media, which means missing out on a lot of what your friends are doing, as well as your bullies.

3. Anxiety is more obvious because we talk about it more.
I have never been a worrier but even I have my moments. When I was younger, though, I kept it all bottled up, I never spoke about it until the pressure hit the limit and it all came out. It wasn't healthy, it did me no good at all keeping it bottled up. It would have been way better if I'd felt able to speak out. If I'd been able to talk to the adults who were unknowingly making things worse, if people had listened and cared and made changes to how things were done so that kids who were struggling didn't have to struggle so much, we'd all have been better off. It's absolutely bl..dy brilliant that people feel able to talk about it now. As I said, the bagkitten is far more of a worrier than I ever was, but she talks about it. She tells me when she can't get to sleep because she's worrying about something, or when something is upsetting or scaring her. Even at 11, she knows it's normal for people to not always be OK and most importantly, that it's normal to talk about it. And because people talk about mental health more, things have changed. People don't feel that they have to shut up and just cope any more and that's just plain damn great.




I get so very pissed off about the "snowflake generation" crap. I'm just not seeing any particular sign of snowflakiness in kids and young adults - they're just, rightly, a whole lot more vocal about the sh.t they're dealing with and they're not putting up and shutting up as young people were expected to do a few decades ago. We weren't any more resilient than young people are now, we just internalised the cracks and put on a facade, and nothing changed for us or for future generations. f.ck that, I'm all for speaking out and being considerate of others and changing stuff that needs changing to make things better for everyone.

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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by bagpuss » Wed Jul 13, 2022 3:23 pm

plodder wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:41 pm
Calling young people on the phone is seen as a direct assault on their personal space, even at work, communication needs to be done via messenger / instant chat for it to be non-intrusive. Or maybe that's just me. This feels like a pretty fundamental change in the way people engage with each other and the world.
I'm 52 and I have always found people calling me on the phone to be a direct assault on my personal space. Texts/WhatsApp/Messenger/chat/Teams/whatever just plain is less intrusive.

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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by Opti » Wed Jul 13, 2022 3:28 pm

bagpuss wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 3:23 pm

I'm 52 and I have always found people calling me on the phone to be a direct assault on my personal space. Texts/WhatsApp/Messenger/chat/Teams/whatever just plain is less intrusive.
This.
Time for a big fat one.

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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by plodder » Wed Jul 13, 2022 3:36 pm

Opti wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 3:28 pm
bagpuss wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 3:23 pm

I'm 52 and I have always found people calling me on the phone to be a direct assault on my personal space. Texts/WhatsApp/Messenger/chat/Teams/whatever just plain is less intrusive.
This.
Interesting - I feel the opposite.

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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Jul 13, 2022 3:57 pm

plodder wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:59 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:53 pm
plodder wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:41 pm
[
Mate honestly as kids we got taught to lean a door against the wall to hide under with our canned goods for when the bomb dropped.
Didn't drop though, did it? Talk to people who've watched bombs falling around them and ask whether it made them anxious.
No one knew that at the time.

The +4 degrees doomsday stuff won't happen for a few years yet - what we're seeing at the moment is extreme weather happening a bit more often. So I don't really accept the distinction.
Hmmm. Like, we had fire drills a lot at school, but they didn't make me particularly anxious about fires. Constant news about schools burning down would've, especially if politicians were continuing to invest in pouring accelerants in the classrooms. The school shooter drills in the US are a closer analogy, but are also a more recent phenomenon.

If there's a generational difference in concern, that'd be interesting. It could be because of a lack of ability to extrapolate present trends into the future, or a difficulty imagining themselves living in it. But I'll be 10 years off retirement in 2050 and I do have certain preferences for what it'll be like, and those decisions have to be made right now.
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Re: Young people and anxiety

Post by dyqik » Wed Jul 13, 2022 4:40 pm

lpm wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:32 pm
Snowflake generation to mean "less resilient and more prone to taking offence" entered the dictionary in 2016.
I.e., when the right went full culture war, and when Trump was running.

Nothing to do with reality.

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