Dr Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general, said allowing children to use social media was like giving them medicine that is not proven to be safe. He said the failure of governments to better regulate social media in recent years was “insane”.

Everything's unaffordable, the world is on fire and we're doing somewhere between "too little, too late" and "nothing", you can barely own anything anymore (only subscribe/rent), owning a house is a pipe dream for many, on top of all that, the Nazis are back, and more.

But yeah, let's blame social media for the kids being unhappy. If they don't know about all this bad stuff, they won't be unhappy about it. Genius!

Have they finally moved on from blaming video games for everything?

I'm sorry, social media is the problem? It's a part of the problem sure but not THE problem. We just want to afford rent and feed our families. It's really not a big ask.

As late as 1980, a high school graduate could be self supporting the minute they turned 18. A minimum wage job could support a studio apartment and pay for some luxuries while putting a few dollars in the bank

Of course people were happier when they felt like they were in control of their lives.

Time to do nothing about the underlying causes.

Look what they're being left to inherit.

Younger people are increasingly seen as a resource to be harvested by their parents and grandparents. They are expected to go into debt to start their careers, go into more debt to buy exorbitantly priced houses from the older generation, and pay into a Social Security program they will never see a dime of, all while having to save for their own retirement. And I bet their parents will expect their kids to build an addition to that mythical house when the parents get to be too old to take care of themselves.

Their grandparents complain they don't work hard enough or spend money on frivolous things, while failing to see the hole that Gramps put the younger generation in, so the olders can continue to be on the government dole in retirement.

The older generations will die while the younger generation has to deal with the aftermath of the older generations terrible decisions.

Of course they’re happy, they don’t have to deal with the consequences.

Wow look when you fuck up the fabric of society and take away the social safety net and ruin the planet so we’re all probably going to be killed by the changing climate, young people are unhappy! In fact they are more unhappy than previous generations! I’ve never been so insulted by a piece of research in my entire fucking life fuck

I think maybe it isn’t the social media itself but the fact that we are letting impressionable kids be exposed to multi billion dollar recommendation algos that are designed to exploit human psychology for engagement metrics that get boosted whenever people feel inflamed or ashamed. I feel like we are going to look back in 20 years and see this paradigm as bad as letting cigarettes advertise to kids

Real talk, as a parent, it distresses me to think about my kids' future. Shit's going to start going sideways fast by the time they're adults. They're going to have to deal with so much awful bullshit because of a bunch of rich/old fucks making decisions that they are beyond the consequences of. I wonder if they'll have kids, but I doubt it; I sometimes feel guilty having brought them into this, and I wouldn't blame them for not wanting to have their own when things start really falling apart. I'm just trying to appreciate the good times while we have them, and being cognizant that they're not going to last.

I'm trying to be politically active, trying to make a difference where I can to make sure they inherit a better world, but it's damn hard to find the time.

Damn these kids must be pretty strong. With my levels of frustration, depression and loneliness, it nearly kills me.

Even if you just consume the correct media, no fake news and no tiktok brain melting dopamine rush content, you still find out more about the world and what's going wrong by two clicks. Be it the climate catastrophe, carcinogenic food and materials, war going on or simple economy crisis. That's all my grandparents didn't have to read or to deal with in such an excessive way. Large news made it the tv news and local issues never had this huge impact on their lives. Print was slow and compacted.

You could say ignorance is a bliss. Now add all the dopamine killers and you get a toxic cocktail, that our brain can't handle. We jump from one extreme to the other and can hardly escape it.

The only solution is a healthy abstinence from most news for most of the day, activities counteracting bad events (like community work or going into politics) and avoiding all dopamine rush things. I bet we could also make school (and later work) feel less shit, so we're less inclined into counteracting by indulging into bad habits.

There's a lot of pressure on young people and we've yet to gasp this. The first generation who had to deal with all of this at once, are only approaching their 30s. Give it another 30 and they might be into the positions to effect things for the better. But I see at least 3 more decades of things getting worse.