Our culture emphasizes college first for teens and everything else is a distant second and third option if that. We also mature differently. I believe college should have been an option for me at 16, instead of waiting until 18 to do so (and wasting a lot of time those 2 years in between).
Similarly, there are some young couples who are more mature than many at 18, and we shouldn’t shun all younger couples from having children. That’s a taboo subject but we’ve moved the acceptable timeline to have children to the mid 20’s to the later 30’s. Historically, doing so around 18 was common. I speak from personal experience, having partnered with someone from 17 to 27, but cultural forces told us we were too young to have children even though we discussed it plenty. Now at 35 and single, I may not have that option anymore.
I think what I’m trying to say is that we need to allow teenagers to enter society at a much more accelerated rate, for those who are ready, else have them risk depression or risky behaviors. But it’s easier to say “no” to all sex than to teach teens about good relationship behaviors.
I definitely agree. Having children in my early 20s is the best thing I have done. One reason why I chose that path was that I had the feeling that waiting for years together for life to begin could make me and my partner tire of each other. I think that having something impirtant to do together can bring people who like each other closer together.
That said, having children earlier than recommended really did ruin all our career opportunities. Not because we were technically unable to follow the "right" path also with a child or two, but because our priorities changed. School books seemed like a waste of time, now that there was less of that thing. We decided to live where there was room for children, not where career opportunities were great. All in all, I suspect there is a reason why society rather push young people to be miserable than recommend them to start adult life earlier: If people get to comfortable too early, they might be lost from the rat race forever.
According to the media, the current high-supervision child-rearing style in the US became popular among the well-educated middle class around a generation before it became popular among the other classes. You may be able to exploit this to dissect statistics to separate causation between high-supervision child-rearing and other social changes.
Interesting! A difficulty I immediately see is that teenagers from the well-educated middle class have, statistically speaking, always been less depressed than teenagers with smaller academic ambitions. So I would probably never be able to show how supervision made educated middle-class kids depressed in the 1990s, because it probably didn't. Maybe high-supervision parenting could be included on the list of "luxury beliefs"? It works well in very resourceful families, but leads to dangerous levels of boredom in less resourceful families.
Most people would say exactly the opposite, I guess: That freedom for children is a luxury belief for the middle class. I think it would be useful to bear both hypotheses in mind.
After reading over this post, I think you might have meant something different from what comes across with your use of the word "freedom." Maybe... supervision? I don't really know what you mean, because it seems like you set up to say very weird things, which leave me saying "But being a dropout and going to live like an illiterate farm hand should be legal, but it's not" and then you tell us it's great to have a role model who just dropped out of school and became a farmer who had never seen revolving doors.
> If teenagers, or any group of people has too much freedom, anarchy will ensue. It will be the rule of the strongest and everyone else will be their victims.
In my experience, "too much freedom" for teens usually entails the ability to drink, watch adult shows on a large screen, have a cell phone, hang around with strange friends, or skip/go to church. Nobody, except perhaps for the most extreme libertarians, believes there should be no protection from predators.
> Also, if people are free to be entirely hedonistic, they might see their friends die from drug overdoses and accidents and violence. Too much freedom doesn't make people optimally happy. Especially not immature people like teenagers.
Or maybe they'll just wait until they grow up and then kill themselves afterwards, the way more than one of my friends did? Smart teens are often more mature than their adult supervisors, and even presuming your idea of a happiness-freedom curve holds true, their curves will be shifted to the right of their peers'.
> Anders said I shouldn't use Kaleb Cooper as an example, because Americans don't know who he is.
Well Tove, I think the very fact that I didn't know Kaleb Cooper gave you a good, solid justification for telling me about him. Now I know! He's a bit like the real-life version of Letterkenny's Wayne: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raeE8Amt8s8
I don't think it's weird. It is an unusual way of thinking, but I believe it makes sense. People cure themselves from depression all the time. Sometimes with rather unwholesome means. Take those unwholesome means away, and depression rates will rise.
>>Smart teens are often more mature than their adult supervisors, and even presuming your idea of a happiness-freedom curve holds true, their curves will be shifted to the right of their peers'.
Yes, that U-curve is based on a population as an aggregate. For teenagers and adults alike. Some teenagers can be left to do exactly what they like and they will do sensible things and be fine. Others need to be locked up in an institution to avoid taking an overdose.
>>He's a bit like the real-life version of Letterkenny's Wayne
> I don't think it's weird. It is an unusual way of thinking, but I believe it makes sense. People cure themselves from depression all the time. Sometimes with rather unwholesome means. Take those unwholesome means away, and depression rates will rise.
Politics and interests are different, maybe? Also it's possible I'm still not understanding you, so I looked again; you talk a lot about the idea that more freedom isn't necessarily better, and the curve here... https://woodfromeden.substack.com/i/123960385/a-new-u-curve ...gives the impression you think we *are* at a point where more freedom is worse. But maybe you just want more avenues for people to follow your own life path? I don't really know - lately I feel as though I'm far outside your target audience, and I get that you may not really be concerned with my own interpretation of your writing.
>> you talk a lot about the idea that more freedom isn't necessarily better, and the curve here
Yes, I meant that I don't think the U-curve of teenage mental health is a law of nature. I think that at least in theory, some societies could be very good at directing their citizens into activities that make them happy enough. Such societies would have a different shape of its curve between freedom and teenage mental health. But I think that in mainstream Western society, most people need some freedom to be happy.
>>gives the impression you think we *are* at a point where more freedom is worse.
No, no, I meant the opposite, that today's teenagers have far too little freedom, which forces many of them into paths that don't suit them mentally.
>>lately I feel as though I'm far outside your target audience, and I get that you may not really be concerned with my own interpretation of your writing.
I don't know who else could better represent my target audience. And even if I did, I would be concerned that you don't understand what I'm trying to say. Getting a message through to as many people as possible is the point of writing publicly - everything else is a failure.
I got the idea of an inverse relationship between mental health and freedom when I read Samantha Geimer's book about her life after being raped by Roman Polanski when she was 13 years old in 1977. She didn't write that she became a depressed teenager. Instead she wrote that she became a teenager who acted hedonistically and shortsightedly (taking drugs, having bad boyfriends, ignoring her studies). She didn't feel well enough to study hard and go to university as her parents wanted her to. Instead she hung out with other teenagers who also felt they couldn't, or wouldn't, keep up with such expectations. What are such young people doing today, when middle class teenagers don't have those opportunities to act hedonistically together? My guess is that many of them are being depressed and anxious instead.
I also watched an episode of Welcome to Wrexham that featured football hooligans. A former hooligan explained that weekend hooliganism was a way to relieve psychological tensions built up during the week. If he was right, what are his younger peers doing to relieve their tensions? Maybe they are doing something better. Maybe they are taking anxiety medication.
So I got the idea that maybe part of the teenage happiness of the past decades was actually due to teenagers doing things that made them, but few others, happy at the moment. If Scott Alexander or Freddie deBoer had got this idea I think they could have written something entirely understandable and even witty about it. When I'm the one who gets an idea I need to write and re-write and delete and paste. Maybe I didn't make the best of it this time.
Even if I don't always understand you, you're still a good writer. And there are a *lot* of pundits out there who are extremely successful without writing very well at all. Being popular, writing clearly, and having talent are all different from each other.
I think what happened for me with this post was that you began to develop a nuanced position that *actually* freedom doesn't *always* lead to emotional health, but didn't reiterate enough for me to see this was your point, so when then you focused on the nuance, the main part of your position disappeared.
Probably I can give two takeaways from this:
1. Nobody understands anything anyone says. Repetition, examples, and graphics are all things that really help. On top of that, Scott Alexander often writes defensively, sensing ways in which people could misunderstand him, and deliberately clarifying what he isn't saying.
2. Everybody builds a picture of you, and the picture forms a background of what they think you're saying. I think this is is 80% of why Scott "writes well;" people assume their picture of him as a nice, reasonable, inventive guy always holds. Then he analyses Lacan, and they're like, "Oh, what a good writer." It really, really helps that he's part of a rationalist clique that most of his readers are also in.
You and I live in a more independent space, so people approach us and don't really know right away what we're looking at. You two used to think I thought I was a good cook or something, right? I'm definitely still figuring the two of you out, because while I find you and Anders interesting, you're obviously also very different from myself. Anders likes daylight savings time, and doesn't drink; you feel restlessly driven to work and are suspicious of pornography; every time I read WfE, I'm ready to strap myself in for a ride in a strange world.
Writing is always a trade-off between brevity and clarity. I envy those few who can easily write texts that are both wordy and readable, but I need to cut a lot in what I write. I probably always err on one side or the other.
>>You two used to think I thought I was a good cook or something, right?
No, we didn't think that. You make far too many jokes about apple pies to be someone who takes cooking very seriously.
>> every time I read WfE, I'm ready to strap myself in for a ride in a strange world
I guess that is a compliment, because I often stop reading things people write when they get too predictable.
I used to love writing fiction way too much for someone who was so bad at it. People have told me "You need to write a million words to be a good writer," but I must have been pushing two million words and my fiction was still very hit-and-miss. It's like things that I wrote were only good by pure chance, and half of what I wrote was a real waste of time. My wife put up with a *lot* of bad stories from those days.
Then I started an offline writers' group that met every Tuesday. It was extremely difficult to get it started - the first set of people who showed up were all terrible, and I had to be very patient. But over time better writers showed up, and more, until after a year there were so many of us we could no longer all meet together at the same table. Most critically, my fiction improved dramatically.
The format we used was simple: Everyone brought paper copies of the first page of a book, a short story, or a chapter they'd written. Someone else - not the person who wrote the submission - read that page aloud while others followed along, and then we went around the table while everyone shared the things they found wrong with it.
It helped a lot that the tenor of the discussions was very much like "This was awful, like, truly awful, it made my eyes bleed to look at it, especially A and B. But I think you could fix A with X, and if you just took out B then the whole thing might actually be sort of OK." I think that over-the-top roasting was a key ingredient, because it reinforced that nothing was really meant except in a spirit of constructive criticism. Being forced to tell another person their work was good was actually somewhat of a disappointment, since that meant we couldn't offer useful improvement. That was the whole point - not to showcase writing, not to sell anything, *just* to improve.
Yes and no. It is obvious that he didn't really write that book himself. It is organized in chapters, where Kaleb writes what he thinks about different themes. It is highly likely that an editor sent him a number of keywords, asked him to write what he thinks of those things and then edited his writing heavily (in the acknowledgement section he thanks his editor for changing his text from Kaleb to Fancy Writing).
If Kaleb is not outrighly lying, he is a celebrity who shovels manure during the days. Probably he earns some celebrity rent. But my bet is that he will use that money for his ambition to buy a farm in that expensive location not far from London that he calls home. In contrast to Paris Hilton, he has another job when showbusiness finds new favorites.
This is a tricky topic to decipher. I do like the theory that teenage loneliness is the big underlying issue. Teens used to get together more, in groups, and that made them feel better. But also, when they were alone together they sometimes drank too much or smoked some weed or had some unprotected sex. Such is life. So in this theory (which is consistent with survey data on loneliness) the drop in "bad" behavior is really a drop in hanging out. This overlaps a lot with what you are saying, I think. (But not necessarily the title of your post, as the causality line is slightly different.)
Well... Once upon a time arranged marriages were a thing. In those circumstances it wasn't the ugly, awkward, goody-two-shoes introverts who ended up depressed, but people with crazy parents who wanted them to marry some yucky person whose relatives had a bit of cash. So maybe some kind of middle ground could be reached where dates could be arranged by aunts and uncles, or professional match-makers, or something?
No hear me out here, maybe some psychologist/priest/doctor could be a permanent fixture of society, and everyone has appointments to talk to this person for low-level therapy, and it's one of this person's jobs to figure out how to connect young people with job interviews, dates, and scholarships, things of this nature. Our phone is constantly ringing off the hook for the sake of our kids' teeth, but nobody seems to care if they all turn into the Unabomber (like Tove's alter ego, the Unabomber).
Yes! That was what I wanted to write (but probably didn't write, exactly). Most people agree that for adults, getting together is difficult. For that reason, ingesting poisonous substances and having risky sex is accepted for adults as long as it helps them getting together. Many people hope that for teenagers, getting together is easier, so the teenagers do not need to copy the worst parts of adult behavior. I think hitherto, the results are disappointing for the people who hold such hopes. It seems like getting together is difficult for teenagers too and the more rules and control there are over how teenagers can get together, the less they will get together.
I think that when someone says "We need to fight teenage depression" the logical next question should be: "To what price?" What are we willing to sacrifice so teenagers can feel better? What are we actually not willing to sacrifice?
Related tangent: I know an adult who moved to a new community, and as an athiest non-drinker with no kids, they struggle with loneliness because it has been tricky to find social occasions with other folks nearby. It's not just the teens.
It's hard to think that the "better" answer was when we were kids sneaking out into the woods with cases of cheap beer - but maybe the data says yes? Or at least in some ways, for some of us?
I think that first of all we need to separate "happier" and "better" (which I think is a thing for example Jonathan Haidt fails to do). Apparently, kids who sneaked into the woods with cheap beer were happier. Was it better? That's another type of question, with no objective answer.
Now, moving from data to pure speculation... Something that sounds right to me about your idea of "freedom" is also the question teens ask themselves about "am I doing this right?" Like, I believe they want to be in a feedback loop that says "here's what success looks like & gosh you are doing it well."
So you see better numbers amongst those high achievers because they are chasing this academic metric and hitting it. Great for them. Tangent: that was me too, until I got into a very competitive university and had to live as a merely average person. Very very depressing experience for an 18 year old - those were some rough years.
Other studies show better numbers amongst conservatives (in the US, anyhow). I personally hate the Josh Hawley worldview, but there might be truth that for many people locked into a traditional view of what they should be doing, they can then do it & feel good about meeting their goals. It works in the numbers because many people can fit that mold, but y'know - tough luck for the LGBTQ+ crowd...
The people who criticize social media for harming girls probably have a point, and the charts show worse numbers for girls. This same mechanism of expectations could fit: it was one thing to see glamorous magazine photos of models, but these tiktoks and instas seem weirdly accessible and fake an aura of realism in disturbing ways, I think.
Again, I think this is a mechanism that overlaps what you are saying about freedom, just that the enforcement is through a fuzzy channel of societal expectations rather than firm parental rules or something.
>>that was me too, until I got into a very competitive university and had to live as a merely average person.
Interesting. I thought the point of elite universities was to collect smart people who could finally belong. Apparently, it doesn't always work like that.
>>The people who criticize social media for harming girls probably have a point, and the charts show worse numbers for girls.
I think the people who criticize social media fail to answer, and even to pose one question: Are teenagers depressed because of things they do or because of things they do not do? Are girls today more depressed than girls 20 years ago because girls today see even more pictures of beautiful people? (we certainly knew how a woman was supposed to look two decades ago too). Or are they more depressed today because they get fewer signs that they are actually good enough, in spite of not looking like the magazine girls?
I remember when I stopped obsessing over my looks: It was when I realized that I had achieved everything I wanted with the looks I had. There were no things I wanted to do in life that required better looks. Most people might not think of such things so explicitly. But I think it is a very common feeling on the female side: When life tells you that you can get the things you want looking the way you do, then most people move on and obsess over something else. And I think that girls today get that receipt of their worth much later today compared to 20 years ago, or not all.
And yes, I totally agree that the lack of freedom today mostly consists of "a fussy channel of societal expectation". It is like society finally achieved much of what it just tried to achieve 20 years ago.
Nicely written. Your point about Kaleb at the end points up the deeper problem, though, which is that teenagers are free only to do things that don't matter and won't turn out well for them. Few young men have the opportunity to become farmhands or get fiancees, at least among those who show up on the census and get surveyed. We import our farmhands, and even their children (who have to attend school while their young cousins back in the old country are learning to be farmhands, and perhaps will be imported soon) don't have that opportunity.
Now of course there's more wrong than our inability to train farmhands, but it's a good example of the lack of options -- and there's small choice in rotten apples.
That's a good point. The import of a working class people decreases opportunities for the native population to be working class. Somehow, it was like the influx of immigrants in Sweden pulled the native population a step upwards on the social ladder. Natives rather seldom work as cleaners. Instead they are supposed to work with administration of the influx: Teaching, different kinds of social work, policing, while first generation immigrants perform the simplest tasks.
But there is a difference between the US and Europe here. In the US, working immigrants are allover the place. They came for the jobs there are. Every single of them. In Europe, most immigrants came for the more vague goal of a better life. And for most of them, a good life is a city life: In the Third World, the countryside is low status. Arab culture is very urban, for example. That implies that the European countryside is much more left to the natives than the American countryside. Although there are huge numbers of Arabs and Africans in the cities and even the smaller towns, they have little business in the countryside. There are immigrants from Eastern Europe who work in agriculture, but I think they are many times less desperate than those from Latin America in the US.
> In Europe, most immigrants came for the more vague goal of a better life.
It used to be somewhat like that here as well. I have fond memories of 1st generation Mexican-Americans who worked hard side by side with the annoying teenaged Apple Pie in order to send money home to their families. They were glad just to have the opportunity for safe, steady employment. The 2nd and 3rd generation are much worse - something like European-Americans, only (in case you thought it was impossible) even more spoiled.
The US used to have the CCC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps). I wonder what would happen if there were a Permaculture Conservation Corps, which could serve as a pipeline for people who want to gain the skills needed to live an agrarian lifestyle or just connect with nature. No more waiting around to take part in society; I think it's not only good behavior that's the problem, but the need to have it sustained over a long period of time (not to mention at a time when hormones and growing desires for independence are peaking) when the payoff seems increasingly uncertain (social contagion of the idea of late-stage capitalism/anti-work/etc).
Sadly, I think a Permaculture Conservation Corps would disintegrate over the question of what is REAL permaculture. But fundamentally, the CCC is an interesting parallell. During the Great Depression, people had a problem earning a living. Today, people have a problem doing anything at all. I wouldn't be totally surprised if Depression Era style programmes will be tested as a remedy to the epidemic in teenage depression.
> Today, people have a problem doing anything at all.
LOL today's teens are asked to do so very little, and "so very little" seems to be what most of them are capable of. They can't even go twenty minutes without checking their cell phones. (Then again, neither can their parents...)
Our culture emphasizes college first for teens and everything else is a distant second and third option if that. We also mature differently. I believe college should have been an option for me at 16, instead of waiting until 18 to do so (and wasting a lot of time those 2 years in between).
Similarly, there are some young couples who are more mature than many at 18, and we shouldn’t shun all younger couples from having children. That’s a taboo subject but we’ve moved the acceptable timeline to have children to the mid 20’s to the later 30’s. Historically, doing so around 18 was common. I speak from personal experience, having partnered with someone from 17 to 27, but cultural forces told us we were too young to have children even though we discussed it plenty. Now at 35 and single, I may not have that option anymore.
I think what I’m trying to say is that we need to allow teenagers to enter society at a much more accelerated rate, for those who are ready, else have them risk depression or risky behaviors. But it’s easier to say “no” to all sex than to teach teens about good relationship behaviors.
I definitely agree. Having children in my early 20s is the best thing I have done. One reason why I chose that path was that I had the feeling that waiting for years together for life to begin could make me and my partner tire of each other. I think that having something impirtant to do together can bring people who like each other closer together.
That said, having children earlier than recommended really did ruin all our career opportunities. Not because we were technically unable to follow the "right" path also with a child or two, but because our priorities changed. School books seemed like a waste of time, now that there was less of that thing. We decided to live where there was room for children, not where career opportunities were great. All in all, I suspect there is a reason why society rather push young people to be miserable than recommend them to start adult life earlier: If people get to comfortable too early, they might be lost from the rat race forever.
According to the media, the current high-supervision child-rearing style in the US became popular among the well-educated middle class around a generation before it became popular among the other classes. You may be able to exploit this to dissect statistics to separate causation between high-supervision child-rearing and other social changes.
Interesting! A difficulty I immediately see is that teenagers from the well-educated middle class have, statistically speaking, always been less depressed than teenagers with smaller academic ambitions. So I would probably never be able to show how supervision made educated middle-class kids depressed in the 1990s, because it probably didn't. Maybe high-supervision parenting could be included on the list of "luxury beliefs"? It works well in very resourceful families, but leads to dangerous levels of boredom in less resourceful families.
Most people would say exactly the opposite, I guess: That freedom for children is a luxury belief for the middle class. I think it would be useful to bear both hypotheses in mind.
After reading over this post, I think you might have meant something different from what comes across with your use of the word "freedom." Maybe... supervision? I don't really know what you mean, because it seems like you set up to say very weird things, which leave me saying "But being a dropout and going to live like an illiterate farm hand should be legal, but it's not" and then you tell us it's great to have a role model who just dropped out of school and became a farmer who had never seen revolving doors.
> If teenagers, or any group of people has too much freedom, anarchy will ensue. It will be the rule of the strongest and everyone else will be their victims.
In my experience, "too much freedom" for teens usually entails the ability to drink, watch adult shows on a large screen, have a cell phone, hang around with strange friends, or skip/go to church. Nobody, except perhaps for the most extreme libertarians, believes there should be no protection from predators.
> Also, if people are free to be entirely hedonistic, they might see their friends die from drug overdoses and accidents and violence. Too much freedom doesn't make people optimally happy. Especially not immature people like teenagers.
Or maybe they'll just wait until they grow up and then kill themselves afterwards, the way more than one of my friends did? Smart teens are often more mature than their adult supervisors, and even presuming your idea of a happiness-freedom curve holds true, their curves will be shifted to the right of their peers'.
> Anders said I shouldn't use Kaleb Cooper as an example, because Americans don't know who he is.
Well Tove, I think the very fact that I didn't know Kaleb Cooper gave you a good, solid justification for telling me about him. Now I know! He's a bit like the real-life version of Letterkenny's Wayne: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raeE8Amt8s8
I don't think it's weird. It is an unusual way of thinking, but I believe it makes sense. People cure themselves from depression all the time. Sometimes with rather unwholesome means. Take those unwholesome means away, and depression rates will rise.
>>Smart teens are often more mature than their adult supervisors, and even presuming your idea of a happiness-freedom curve holds true, their curves will be shifted to the right of their peers'.
Yes, that U-curve is based on a population as an aggregate. For teenagers and adults alike. Some teenagers can be left to do exactly what they like and they will do sensible things and be fine. Others need to be locked up in an institution to avoid taking an overdose.
>>He's a bit like the real-life version of Letterkenny's Wayne
I like the real guy better.
> I don't think it's weird. It is an unusual way of thinking, but I believe it makes sense. People cure themselves from depression all the time. Sometimes with rather unwholesome means. Take those unwholesome means away, and depression rates will rise.
Politics and interests are different, maybe? Also it's possible I'm still not understanding you, so I looked again; you talk a lot about the idea that more freedom isn't necessarily better, and the curve here... https://woodfromeden.substack.com/i/123960385/a-new-u-curve ...gives the impression you think we *are* at a point where more freedom is worse. But maybe you just want more avenues for people to follow your own life path? I don't really know - lately I feel as though I'm far outside your target audience, and I get that you may not really be concerned with my own interpretation of your writing.
>> you talk a lot about the idea that more freedom isn't necessarily better, and the curve here
Yes, I meant that I don't think the U-curve of teenage mental health is a law of nature. I think that at least in theory, some societies could be very good at directing their citizens into activities that make them happy enough. Such societies would have a different shape of its curve between freedom and teenage mental health. But I think that in mainstream Western society, most people need some freedom to be happy.
>>gives the impression you think we *are* at a point where more freedom is worse.
No, no, I meant the opposite, that today's teenagers have far too little freedom, which forces many of them into paths that don't suit them mentally.
>>lately I feel as though I'm far outside your target audience, and I get that you may not really be concerned with my own interpretation of your writing.
I don't know who else could better represent my target audience. And even if I did, I would be concerned that you don't understand what I'm trying to say. Getting a message through to as many people as possible is the point of writing publicly - everything else is a failure.
I got the idea of an inverse relationship between mental health and freedom when I read Samantha Geimer's book about her life after being raped by Roman Polanski when she was 13 years old in 1977. She didn't write that she became a depressed teenager. Instead she wrote that she became a teenager who acted hedonistically and shortsightedly (taking drugs, having bad boyfriends, ignoring her studies). She didn't feel well enough to study hard and go to university as her parents wanted her to. Instead she hung out with other teenagers who also felt they couldn't, or wouldn't, keep up with such expectations. What are such young people doing today, when middle class teenagers don't have those opportunities to act hedonistically together? My guess is that many of them are being depressed and anxious instead.
I also watched an episode of Welcome to Wrexham that featured football hooligans. A former hooligan explained that weekend hooliganism was a way to relieve psychological tensions built up during the week. If he was right, what are his younger peers doing to relieve their tensions? Maybe they are doing something better. Maybe they are taking anxiety medication.
So I got the idea that maybe part of the teenage happiness of the past decades was actually due to teenagers doing things that made them, but few others, happy at the moment. If Scott Alexander or Freddie deBoer had got this idea I think they could have written something entirely understandable and even witty about it. When I'm the one who gets an idea I need to write and re-write and delete and paste. Maybe I didn't make the best of it this time.
Even if I don't always understand you, you're still a good writer. And there are a *lot* of pundits out there who are extremely successful without writing very well at all. Being popular, writing clearly, and having talent are all different from each other.
I think what happened for me with this post was that you began to develop a nuanced position that *actually* freedom doesn't *always* lead to emotional health, but didn't reiterate enough for me to see this was your point, so when then you focused on the nuance, the main part of your position disappeared.
Probably I can give two takeaways from this:
1. Nobody understands anything anyone says. Repetition, examples, and graphics are all things that really help. On top of that, Scott Alexander often writes defensively, sensing ways in which people could misunderstand him, and deliberately clarifying what he isn't saying.
2. Everybody builds a picture of you, and the picture forms a background of what they think you're saying. I think this is is 80% of why Scott "writes well;" people assume their picture of him as a nice, reasonable, inventive guy always holds. Then he analyses Lacan, and they're like, "Oh, what a good writer." It really, really helps that he's part of a rationalist clique that most of his readers are also in.
You and I live in a more independent space, so people approach us and don't really know right away what we're looking at. You two used to think I thought I was a good cook or something, right? I'm definitely still figuring the two of you out, because while I find you and Anders interesting, you're obviously also very different from myself. Anders likes daylight savings time, and doesn't drink; you feel restlessly driven to work and are suspicious of pornography; every time I read WfE, I'm ready to strap myself in for a ride in a strange world.
Writing is always a trade-off between brevity and clarity. I envy those few who can easily write texts that are both wordy and readable, but I need to cut a lot in what I write. I probably always err on one side or the other.
>>You two used to think I thought I was a good cook or something, right?
No, we didn't think that. You make far too many jokes about apple pies to be someone who takes cooking very seriously.
>> every time I read WfE, I'm ready to strap myself in for a ride in a strange world
I guess that is a compliment, because I often stop reading things people write when they get too predictable.
I know what you need! You need a writers' group!
I used to love writing fiction way too much for someone who was so bad at it. People have told me "You need to write a million words to be a good writer," but I must have been pushing two million words and my fiction was still very hit-and-miss. It's like things that I wrote were only good by pure chance, and half of what I wrote was a real waste of time. My wife put up with a *lot* of bad stories from those days.
Then I started an offline writers' group that met every Tuesday. It was extremely difficult to get it started - the first set of people who showed up were all terrible, and I had to be very patient. But over time better writers showed up, and more, until after a year there were so many of us we could no longer all meet together at the same table. Most critically, my fiction improved dramatically.
The format we used was simple: Everyone brought paper copies of the first page of a book, a short story, or a chapter they'd written. Someone else - not the person who wrote the submission - read that page aloud while others followed along, and then we went around the table while everyone shared the things they found wrong with it.
It helped a lot that the tenor of the discussions was very much like "This was awful, like, truly awful, it made my eyes bleed to look at it, especially A and B. But I think you could fix A with X, and if you just took out B then the whole thing might actually be sort of OK." I think that over-the-top roasting was a key ingredient, because it reinforced that nothing was really meant except in a spirit of constructive criticism. Being forced to tell another person their work was good was actually somewhat of a disappointment, since that meant we couldn't offer useful improvement. That was the whole point - not to showcase writing, not to sell anything, *just* to improve.
>In his book The World According to Kaleb (2022)
>Ticketline
He seems like a showman to me.
Yes and no. It is obvious that he didn't really write that book himself. It is organized in chapters, where Kaleb writes what he thinks about different themes. It is highly likely that an editor sent him a number of keywords, asked him to write what he thinks of those things and then edited his writing heavily (in the acknowledgement section he thanks his editor for changing his text from Kaleb to Fancy Writing).
If Kaleb is not outrighly lying, he is a celebrity who shovels manure during the days. Probably he earns some celebrity rent. But my bet is that he will use that money for his ambition to buy a farm in that expensive location not far from London that he calls home. In contrast to Paris Hilton, he has another job when showbusiness finds new favorites.
This is a tricky topic to decipher. I do like the theory that teenage loneliness is the big underlying issue. Teens used to get together more, in groups, and that made them feel better. But also, when they were alone together they sometimes drank too much or smoked some weed or had some unprotected sex. Such is life. So in this theory (which is consistent with survey data on loneliness) the drop in "bad" behavior is really a drop in hanging out. This overlaps a lot with what you are saying, I think. (But not necessarily the title of your post, as the causality line is slightly different.)
> Such is life.
Well... Once upon a time arranged marriages were a thing. In those circumstances it wasn't the ugly, awkward, goody-two-shoes introverts who ended up depressed, but people with crazy parents who wanted them to marry some yucky person whose relatives had a bit of cash. So maybe some kind of middle ground could be reached where dates could be arranged by aunts and uncles, or professional match-makers, or something?
No hear me out here, maybe some psychologist/priest/doctor could be a permanent fixture of society, and everyone has appointments to talk to this person for low-level therapy, and it's one of this person's jobs to figure out how to connect young people with job interviews, dates, and scholarships, things of this nature. Our phone is constantly ringing off the hook for the sake of our kids' teeth, but nobody seems to care if they all turn into the Unabomber (like Tove's alter ego, the Unabomber).
Yes! That was what I wanted to write (but probably didn't write, exactly). Most people agree that for adults, getting together is difficult. For that reason, ingesting poisonous substances and having risky sex is accepted for adults as long as it helps them getting together. Many people hope that for teenagers, getting together is easier, so the teenagers do not need to copy the worst parts of adult behavior. I think hitherto, the results are disappointing for the people who hold such hopes. It seems like getting together is difficult for teenagers too and the more rules and control there are over how teenagers can get together, the less they will get together.
I think that when someone says "We need to fight teenage depression" the logical next question should be: "To what price?" What are we willing to sacrifice so teenagers can feel better? What are we actually not willing to sacrifice?
Yup.
Related tangent: I know an adult who moved to a new community, and as an athiest non-drinker with no kids, they struggle with loneliness because it has been tricky to find social occasions with other folks nearby. It's not just the teens.
It's hard to think that the "better" answer was when we were kids sneaking out into the woods with cases of cheap beer - but maybe the data says yes? Or at least in some ways, for some of us?
I think that first of all we need to separate "happier" and "better" (which I think is a thing for example Jonathan Haidt fails to do). Apparently, kids who sneaked into the woods with cheap beer were happier. Was it better? That's another type of question, with no objective answer.
Now, moving from data to pure speculation... Something that sounds right to me about your idea of "freedom" is also the question teens ask themselves about "am I doing this right?" Like, I believe they want to be in a feedback loop that says "here's what success looks like & gosh you are doing it well."
So you see better numbers amongst those high achievers because they are chasing this academic metric and hitting it. Great for them. Tangent: that was me too, until I got into a very competitive university and had to live as a merely average person. Very very depressing experience for an 18 year old - those were some rough years.
Other studies show better numbers amongst conservatives (in the US, anyhow). I personally hate the Josh Hawley worldview, but there might be truth that for many people locked into a traditional view of what they should be doing, they can then do it & feel good about meeting their goals. It works in the numbers because many people can fit that mold, but y'know - tough luck for the LGBTQ+ crowd...
The people who criticize social media for harming girls probably have a point, and the charts show worse numbers for girls. This same mechanism of expectations could fit: it was one thing to see glamorous magazine photos of models, but these tiktoks and instas seem weirdly accessible and fake an aura of realism in disturbing ways, I think.
Again, I think this is a mechanism that overlaps what you are saying about freedom, just that the enforcement is through a fuzzy channel of societal expectations rather than firm parental rules or something.
>>that was me too, until I got into a very competitive university and had to live as a merely average person.
Interesting. I thought the point of elite universities was to collect smart people who could finally belong. Apparently, it doesn't always work like that.
>>The people who criticize social media for harming girls probably have a point, and the charts show worse numbers for girls.
I think the people who criticize social media fail to answer, and even to pose one question: Are teenagers depressed because of things they do or because of things they do not do? Are girls today more depressed than girls 20 years ago because girls today see even more pictures of beautiful people? (we certainly knew how a woman was supposed to look two decades ago too). Or are they more depressed today because they get fewer signs that they are actually good enough, in spite of not looking like the magazine girls?
I remember when I stopped obsessing over my looks: It was when I realized that I had achieved everything I wanted with the looks I had. There were no things I wanted to do in life that required better looks. Most people might not think of such things so explicitly. But I think it is a very common feeling on the female side: When life tells you that you can get the things you want looking the way you do, then most people move on and obsess over something else. And I think that girls today get that receipt of their worth much later today compared to 20 years ago, or not all.
And yes, I totally agree that the lack of freedom today mostly consists of "a fussy channel of societal expectation". It is like society finally achieved much of what it just tried to achieve 20 years ago.
Nicely written. Your point about Kaleb at the end points up the deeper problem, though, which is that teenagers are free only to do things that don't matter and won't turn out well for them. Few young men have the opportunity to become farmhands or get fiancees, at least among those who show up on the census and get surveyed. We import our farmhands, and even their children (who have to attend school while their young cousins back in the old country are learning to be farmhands, and perhaps will be imported soon) don't have that opportunity.
Now of course there's more wrong than our inability to train farmhands, but it's a good example of the lack of options -- and there's small choice in rotten apples.
That's a good point. The import of a working class people decreases opportunities for the native population to be working class. Somehow, it was like the influx of immigrants in Sweden pulled the native population a step upwards on the social ladder. Natives rather seldom work as cleaners. Instead they are supposed to work with administration of the influx: Teaching, different kinds of social work, policing, while first generation immigrants perform the simplest tasks.
But there is a difference between the US and Europe here. In the US, working immigrants are allover the place. They came for the jobs there are. Every single of them. In Europe, most immigrants came for the more vague goal of a better life. And for most of them, a good life is a city life: In the Third World, the countryside is low status. Arab culture is very urban, for example. That implies that the European countryside is much more left to the natives than the American countryside. Although there are huge numbers of Arabs and Africans in the cities and even the smaller towns, they have little business in the countryside. There are immigrants from Eastern Europe who work in agriculture, but I think they are many times less desperate than those from Latin America in the US.
> In Europe, most immigrants came for the more vague goal of a better life.
It used to be somewhat like that here as well. I have fond memories of 1st generation Mexican-Americans who worked hard side by side with the annoying teenaged Apple Pie in order to send money home to their families. They were glad just to have the opportunity for safe, steady employment. The 2nd and 3rd generation are much worse - something like European-Americans, only (in case you thought it was impossible) even more spoiled.
The US used to have the CCC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps). I wonder what would happen if there were a Permaculture Conservation Corps, which could serve as a pipeline for people who want to gain the skills needed to live an agrarian lifestyle or just connect with nature. No more waiting around to take part in society; I think it's not only good behavior that's the problem, but the need to have it sustained over a long period of time (not to mention at a time when hormones and growing desires for independence are peaking) when the payoff seems increasingly uncertain (social contagion of the idea of late-stage capitalism/anti-work/etc).
Sadly, I think a Permaculture Conservation Corps would disintegrate over the question of what is REAL permaculture. But fundamentally, the CCC is an interesting parallell. During the Great Depression, people had a problem earning a living. Today, people have a problem doing anything at all. I wouldn't be totally surprised if Depression Era style programmes will be tested as a remedy to the epidemic in teenage depression.
> Today, people have a problem doing anything at all.
LOL today's teens are asked to do so very little, and "so very little" seems to be what most of them are capable of. They can't even go twenty minutes without checking their cell phones. (Then again, neither can their parents...)