Jonathan Haidt and his team say teenage girls are depressed because they use social media too much. It could also be that girls are depressed because the outlooks for girls have deteriorated
I think it's also important to point out that as globalism has drastically changed the job market and inflation has gutted the middle class, young people are naturally reacting to their poor prospects overall as they see their opportunities to become an adult curtailed.
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, the Amish still become adults, although many of them are doing other things than a generation ago. So far, the extremely local Amish have adapted to the global job market. I think mainstream society could to that too, if we had the ambition. Making enough money to physically support a family is in no way impossible. It is overwhelmingly a culturally based question of where one should live and what one should do in order to count.
"By this I don't mean to say girls were, or are, lazy, or get everything for free, as some incels claim". Man-hating feminists will grow old alone with cats and box wine.
> Incels say young women should be happy with the situation because they have more power to choose.
This is absolutely true, though. There is a critical asymmetry between the men and the women you're talking about. For the women, literally all they would have to do is _nothing_ and the problem would go away. Just _don't_ open Tinder. Just _don't_ go to the guy's house. But for men, the men you're talking, there is nothing they can do, and nothing they can stop doing, that will fix anything for them
this was good. however, i suspect the rise in depression cannot be attributed to any one pet theory, but rather the compounding effects of the world generally getting worse in most metrics.
social media is an attention sponge. in general, what are some effective ways to combat depression? taking care of onesself. cooking, exercise, social time etc. if your attention is absorbed in spending 5+ hours on social media every day as your cited graphs indicate, thats 5+ less possible hours you have to take care of yourself. of course people are going to be more depressed.
"The question is how this could be a new phenomenon. Everyone, both males and females, have always strived for the best partner they could get. Why has this instinct wrecked the partner market only for the last decade or two? "
It is difficult to just put this statement in without context, because to assume this is to destroy the entire argument. Best partner means many things. For men, the prettiest girl they think they can find. It is why women obsess over their looks. For women, it is looking for the most accomplished man they can find, by way of economic success. Men will marry down. Women will not. As women have become more educated and economically accomplished, they are looking for a man more accomplished and economically secure than themselves. This is a mathematical impossibility at scale.
I'm sure it will shake out - but the reason for women unhappiness - which has been climbing essentially as they became more economically and professionally accomplished - may be because their sense of accomplishment in finding a life partner has deteriorated. Demographic assumptions are that women will increasingly not marry. The outlook for the millennial generation re-producing itself I think is overly optimistic. Until women re-assess what they want in a partner, and realizing they are becoming well more credentialed compared to men (60/40 college split right now) married family formation will continue to deteriorate.
A side note - what they expect from government is also misplaced. Men have decided they are done with paying for it, and voted this term pretty ferociously to shrink government. So single college educated women have some interesting decisions to make. Men still way more proportionately than women do the dirty dangerous jobs that pay more. So despite a loss of credentials, they still make more. If they are unwilling to pay the taxes necessary to make uncle sugar viable, it will be an interesting few decades of adjustment.
Funny, hadn’t heard “Becky” before, but it’s both sad and accurate.
We tend to focus on the liberal blue haired whales, and not the Beckies.
But so many times, when you see a late 30 or early 40s woman online, depressed, and lamenting her choices, she is moderately attractive, but not beautiful.
A certain facial physiognomy geometry that’s “off,” but you can’t quite put your finger on it until you play, “she would be prettier if xxx.”
I recently had discussion with a female friend who is having quite severe problems with depression, and even more severe problems due to the depression. Not to go into too many details, but I asked her explicitly "do you feel that you are unworthy of love if you do not achieve something special and extraordinary in your life?". Her eyes teared up, and she said she hated me for pointing it out for her. She doesn't really understand what her value is, and even less that she has value even if she doesn't perform academically.
She's been trying and failing for years to get a "special" career, but it's pretty obvious to me that she is _desperate_ for love and commitment. Her dysfunctional response to this need has, as is usual for many a woman today, been one night stands and flings with "exciting" men that either are profoundly unsuitable for commitment, or which she is incapable of getting to commit. Also, she's a single mom, due to the aforementioned.
Judging by the Nokia candy bar phones, I’m guessing this was filmed in the early to mid 2000’s, before phone and social media saturation. I’m not sure how representative a sample these women are but if so, more than a few liberal European Beckies seem very keen to marry *extremely* low-status men (poor, uneducated, unemployed) just to get affection, love, and commitment, even knowing it’s likely fake.
Frenchwoman Angel is almost literally quoting you when she says 30-year old French men are not willing to marry and start a family.
So Beckies haven’t been having a good time in the dating market for a long time.
This is a very accurate and insightful article, but missing one important qualification. All this is happening to mainstream-cultured people within eg US society, whereas immigrant groups from non-assimilated cultures are continuing to couple according to traditional dynamics.
I don't want to slide dangerously toward the Camus direction but this spells civilizational collapse for Western culture.
>whereas immigrant groups from non-assimilated cultures are continuing to couple according to traditional dynamics
This is not true. The United States assimilates (more-or-less) all cultures into the grey globohomo goo. Fertility rates for Asians in the United States is scarcely 1.3, while American-born Hispanics have a fertility rate a fair ways below replacement. Currently it is only Amish, Hasidic Jews and a handful of Mormon sects who are resistant to this and so will comprise the future majority population of the United States
Extended adolescence and its consequences have been a disaster for western civilization. For “average” girls, who don’t have academic ambitions, aspiring to be wives and mothers has been anathematized by mainstream culture, which presents it as patriarchal oppression at worst, or “settling” at best.
This artificial shame infrastructure around completely normal desires has cut down massive numbers of average women and pressured them into doing things they don’t really want to, like STEM jobs, and prolonged periods of paying into profitable higher education schemes. The higher rates of depression are, in part, the consequences of this playing out on a wide scale. In the past, this extended angst-laden period of adolescence didn’t exist, you would get married as a teenager and get to work having children and working on the farm. Though austere by contemporary standards, this kind of work gave immediate focus and purpose to the average man or woman’s life, and kept them from spending much if any time stewing on existential self-doubt, and unrealistic standards and toxic ideas introduced by entertainment media today. On top of that, one’s sense or purpose and worth was established in relational terms as part of a small community; in the modern west, your sense of value is based on your individual self and sense of achievement in a zero-sum competition with everybody else, a naturally higher-anxiety environment.
Accordingly, the standard has been raised so high that average girls have been gaslit into thinking they’re failing miserably if they’re not experiencing massive self-actualization as a Princess, the hero of her own personal fairy tale.
This incentivizes girls to try to marry men of much higher status than themselves, putting them into competition for men they likely won’t win, while disregarding the men with whom they would have had successful relationships in past times. Technology exacerbates this, because while in the past women would have had a range of suitors limited to whoever was in her school, church, or local community, thanks to social media the radius of potential suitors is unnaturally expanded hundreds, if not thousands of miles. Likewise, this exposes women to increased competition and comparison from other women across basically the entire world. Now Becky doesn’t just compare her status relative to one or two super high-status Stacy girls at school; she constantly scrolls past dozens, if not hundreds, of women on social media who are better looking, have hot boyfriends, go on lavish vacations, and show off extravagant consumer items. Thus, Becky can be completely normal, but experience depression because she holds herself to a completely ludicrous standard.
In conclusion, it’s an unholy confluence of toxic, hyper-individualistic culture and technology augmenting one’s social environment in deeply unnatural ways that is the most likely culprit behind rising depression in normal young women. This can be solved by a return to more natural states of being in local communities with strong bonds that keep technology at an arm’s length, a task easier said than done; but, as the Amish suggest, amongst others, by no means impossible.
I love this ending paragraph where you discuss the fact that teenagers need ideas about what to do when they aren't looking at their screens. I have been thinking about how I could invite girl teens I know to go do things that really don't require phones, and then model leaving my phone behind. Here are a few ideas I came up with:
1. Invite ones who live nearby to go on walks, either with me or their mom and me.
2. Have them over for a screen free girls night (baking, playing games, crafting, or playing musical instruments)
3. Ask them what they're reading, check it out for myself and then recommend books I think they would like.
4. Schedule a big hike and we can't use our phones to get there or to navigate at all once we're outside.
I do some of this stuff already, but your post has definitely inspired me to make sure I'm working towards encouraging the next generation to come out of the screen hole. There is a great deal of life and light outside of it.
Since we are a family with a phone-free lifestyle we more or less have the opposite problem: learning to use the GPS of a phone in order to make a trip, for example. So I don't have anything more to add than a rather uninformative "don't use phones".
I think it's also important to point out that as globalism has drastically changed the job market and inflation has gutted the middle class, young people are naturally reacting to their poor prospects overall as they see their opportunities to become an adult curtailed.
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, the Amish still become adults, although many of them are doing other things than a generation ago. So far, the extremely local Amish have adapted to the global job market. I think mainstream society could to that too, if we had the ambition. Making enough money to physically support a family is in no way impossible. It is overwhelmingly a culturally based question of where one should live and what one should do in order to count.
"By this I don't mean to say girls were, or are, lazy, or get everything for free, as some incels claim". Man-hating feminists will grow old alone with cats and box wine.
Good, Becky Deserves To Feel Bad.
> Incels say young women should be happy with the situation because they have more power to choose.
This is absolutely true, though. There is a critical asymmetry between the men and the women you're talking about. For the women, literally all they would have to do is _nothing_ and the problem would go away. Just _don't_ open Tinder. Just _don't_ go to the guy's house. But for men, the men you're talking, there is nothing they can do, and nothing they can stop doing, that will fix anything for them
Exactly. Thank you.
lmao
this was good. however, i suspect the rise in depression cannot be attributed to any one pet theory, but rather the compounding effects of the world generally getting worse in most metrics.
social media is an attention sponge. in general, what are some effective ways to combat depression? taking care of onesself. cooking, exercise, social time etc. if your attention is absorbed in spending 5+ hours on social media every day as your cited graphs indicate, thats 5+ less possible hours you have to take care of yourself. of course people are going to be more depressed.
The author ignores the fact that men account for 80% of suicides.
"The question is how this could be a new phenomenon. Everyone, both males and females, have always strived for the best partner they could get. Why has this instinct wrecked the partner market only for the last decade or two? "
It is difficult to just put this statement in without context, because to assume this is to destroy the entire argument. Best partner means many things. For men, the prettiest girl they think they can find. It is why women obsess over their looks. For women, it is looking for the most accomplished man they can find, by way of economic success. Men will marry down. Women will not. As women have become more educated and economically accomplished, they are looking for a man more accomplished and economically secure than themselves. This is a mathematical impossibility at scale.
I'm sure it will shake out - but the reason for women unhappiness - which has been climbing essentially as they became more economically and professionally accomplished - may be because their sense of accomplishment in finding a life partner has deteriorated. Demographic assumptions are that women will increasingly not marry. The outlook for the millennial generation re-producing itself I think is overly optimistic. Until women re-assess what they want in a partner, and realizing they are becoming well more credentialed compared to men (60/40 college split right now) married family formation will continue to deteriorate.
A side note - what they expect from government is also misplaced. Men have decided they are done with paying for it, and voted this term pretty ferociously to shrink government. So single college educated women have some interesting decisions to make. Men still way more proportionately than women do the dirty dangerous jobs that pay more. So despite a loss of credentials, they still make more. If they are unwilling to pay the taxes necessary to make uncle sugar viable, it will be an interesting few decades of adjustment.
Funny, hadn’t heard “Becky” before, but it’s both sad and accurate.
We tend to focus on the liberal blue haired whales, and not the Beckies.
But so many times, when you see a late 30 or early 40s woman online, depressed, and lamenting her choices, she is moderately attractive, but not beautiful.
A certain facial physiognomy geometry that’s “off,” but you can’t quite put your finger on it until you play, “she would be prettier if xxx.”
Perhaps memes will save them…
Sorry Becky. Just being a hole won't do
I recently had discussion with a female friend who is having quite severe problems with depression, and even more severe problems due to the depression. Not to go into too many details, but I asked her explicitly "do you feel that you are unworthy of love if you do not achieve something special and extraordinary in your life?". Her eyes teared up, and she said she hated me for pointing it out for her. She doesn't really understand what her value is, and even less that she has value even if she doesn't perform academically.
She's been trying and failing for years to get a "special" career, but it's pretty obvious to me that she is _desperate_ for love and commitment. Her dysfunctional response to this need has, as is usual for many a woman today, been one night stands and flings with "exciting" men that either are profoundly unsuitable for commitment, or which she is incapable of getting to commit. Also, she's a single mom, due to the aforementioned.
I’m going to simply just say every time on this: STEPHEN HAWKING
Thank you. I have referenced this post here: https://expressiveegg.substack.com/p/man-and-woman-no-paywall-comments
A bit late to the discussion but read this the day after watching this https://youtu.be/Sp84fX30UVg
Judging by the Nokia candy bar phones, I’m guessing this was filmed in the early to mid 2000’s, before phone and social media saturation. I’m not sure how representative a sample these women are but if so, more than a few liberal European Beckies seem very keen to marry *extremely* low-status men (poor, uneducated, unemployed) just to get affection, love, and commitment, even knowing it’s likely fake.
Frenchwoman Angel is almost literally quoting you when she says 30-year old French men are not willing to marry and start a family.
So Beckies haven’t been having a good time in the dating market for a long time.
This is a very accurate and insightful article, but missing one important qualification. All this is happening to mainstream-cultured people within eg US society, whereas immigrant groups from non-assimilated cultures are continuing to couple according to traditional dynamics.
I don't want to slide dangerously toward the Camus direction but this spells civilizational collapse for Western culture.
>whereas immigrant groups from non-assimilated cultures are continuing to couple according to traditional dynamics
This is not true. The United States assimilates (more-or-less) all cultures into the grey globohomo goo. Fertility rates for Asians in the United States is scarcely 1.3, while American-born Hispanics have a fertility rate a fair ways below replacement. Currently it is only Amish, Hasidic Jews and a handful of Mormon sects who are resistant to this and so will comprise the future majority population of the United States
Extended adolescence and its consequences have been a disaster for western civilization. For “average” girls, who don’t have academic ambitions, aspiring to be wives and mothers has been anathematized by mainstream culture, which presents it as patriarchal oppression at worst, or “settling” at best.
This artificial shame infrastructure around completely normal desires has cut down massive numbers of average women and pressured them into doing things they don’t really want to, like STEM jobs, and prolonged periods of paying into profitable higher education schemes. The higher rates of depression are, in part, the consequences of this playing out on a wide scale. In the past, this extended angst-laden period of adolescence didn’t exist, you would get married as a teenager and get to work having children and working on the farm. Though austere by contemporary standards, this kind of work gave immediate focus and purpose to the average man or woman’s life, and kept them from spending much if any time stewing on existential self-doubt, and unrealistic standards and toxic ideas introduced by entertainment media today. On top of that, one’s sense or purpose and worth was established in relational terms as part of a small community; in the modern west, your sense of value is based on your individual self and sense of achievement in a zero-sum competition with everybody else, a naturally higher-anxiety environment.
Accordingly, the standard has been raised so high that average girls have been gaslit into thinking they’re failing miserably if they’re not experiencing massive self-actualization as a Princess, the hero of her own personal fairy tale.
This incentivizes girls to try to marry men of much higher status than themselves, putting them into competition for men they likely won’t win, while disregarding the men with whom they would have had successful relationships in past times. Technology exacerbates this, because while in the past women would have had a range of suitors limited to whoever was in her school, church, or local community, thanks to social media the radius of potential suitors is unnaturally expanded hundreds, if not thousands of miles. Likewise, this exposes women to increased competition and comparison from other women across basically the entire world. Now Becky doesn’t just compare her status relative to one or two super high-status Stacy girls at school; she constantly scrolls past dozens, if not hundreds, of women on social media who are better looking, have hot boyfriends, go on lavish vacations, and show off extravagant consumer items. Thus, Becky can be completely normal, but experience depression because she holds herself to a completely ludicrous standard.
In conclusion, it’s an unholy confluence of toxic, hyper-individualistic culture and technology augmenting one’s social environment in deeply unnatural ways that is the most likely culprit behind rising depression in normal young women. This can be solved by a return to more natural states of being in local communities with strong bonds that keep technology at an arm’s length, a task easier said than done; but, as the Amish suggest, amongst others, by no means impossible.
I love this ending paragraph where you discuss the fact that teenagers need ideas about what to do when they aren't looking at their screens. I have been thinking about how I could invite girl teens I know to go do things that really don't require phones, and then model leaving my phone behind. Here are a few ideas I came up with:
1. Invite ones who live nearby to go on walks, either with me or their mom and me.
2. Have them over for a screen free girls night (baking, playing games, crafting, or playing musical instruments)
3. Ask them what they're reading, check it out for myself and then recommend books I think they would like.
4. Schedule a big hike and we can't use our phones to get there or to navigate at all once we're outside.
I do some of this stuff already, but your post has definitely inspired me to make sure I'm working towards encouraging the next generation to come out of the screen hole. There is a great deal of life and light outside of it.
Do you have any suggestions to add?
Since we are a family with a phone-free lifestyle we more or less have the opposite problem: learning to use the GPS of a phone in order to make a trip, for example. So I don't have anything more to add than a rather uninformative "don't use phones".