Memes and mental health: How teens are coping with increasing stress
nourishyourmind.com
nourishyourmind.com
Susan Sontag wrote about this in "Regarding the pain of others". Basically as soon as we had the means to know what is happening around the world almost instantly (at least as soon as the information is properly formatted) we opened this exposure to the collective suffering of the entirety of the human race. It is not something one can run from and everyone will eventually be exposed to it. The article goes more into detail of the naturalization of suffering and the ideia that knowing the horrors by recounts and pictures we think we know the horrors themselves. It is very well worth the read.
Oh you can. Just don't visit news sites or watch news TV channels. Paper news papers are way better and don't shove stuff down your throat the same way as rage baiting "this just in" news outlets -- who talks for a day about vague rumors.
I think people zoning out from the spam one thing news cycle is the reason The Man decided to start pushing propaganda in the Windows start menu and Facebook feed or whatever.
Just go to a library. Start browsing. Eventually you will stumble upon a book about the Secons World War. Or about Rwanda... In the information era, you will be exposed accidentally to these kinds of stuff, and learning to recognize that and to develop strategies that prevent this exposure to numb us I think is much more effective than trying to run away from it.
This is a huge problem for communities. The same people that you'd want to run the local kids hockey association or sewer board are drowning in work.
I think the fundamental problem is that society has become to competitive, optimized and effective for our own good.
Like, you'd want the genius entrepreneur guy to run a pub, not some 100 million dollar tech company.
You notice that when visiting poorer countries, that normal people have restaurants and that they are way better. Where as restaurants where I live are run by shady bad people to a big extent -- and by bad people I mean both in a moral sense and a practical sense.
So it’s not the format. It’s our nature to want to understand what’s on the minds of people we care about.
I just hope the take on it will be to understand the watcher is also suffering a lot, and the people you hate as well.
Life is full of of suffering, for every body.
Yes, even the person you are thinking about right now.
And sure, we can always rank suffering by taking examples and saying a raped tortured 6 years old suffers more than your average tech billionaire.
But the main point is, suffering is universal. It's a common ground we all share. It's goes beyond context and morality, because we all agree we don't want to suffer, and we do anyway. That's one of the rare things we all get to experience again and again, and that shapes your life.
I really wish people looking at the internet window will get this as the message, as a way to get closer to the other humans, instead of classify suffering and divide us in categories. Maybe develop a deeper understanding of suffering, which is not just pain or other obvious manifestations.
And also be more kind, tolerant, wish others, and oneself.
In any case, welcoming pain as immanent in life while not being numbed and crushed by the sheer amount of it is a very important skill to develop.
Do we need to stop tending for people's mental health because many are not eating?
Maybe the effort involved in categorising, understanding and prioritising suffering would be better used... well... actually reducing suffering.
Because when we think like this we risk dismanteling efforts that are really important, like protecting other animals from abandonment or abuse, or protecting the environment, because we risk putting them in lower hierarchical priority compared to our own most immediate form of suffering.
But yes, many people would rather protect and house animals than protect and house people. So I guess as humans we should have the same priorities, no?
But if you think protecting the environment is more important than providing people shelter I don’t know what to say. And in fact, I am going to state that it is easier to care about the climate than to provide people with housing, which is why people focus on the formal rather than the later.
I'm somewhat troubled by this line of thinking. Some people suffer due to war, climate change, hunger and so on, and others because their mother passed away peacefully at age 90. These are absolutely not the same and saying suffering is suffering greatly devalues the (somewhat preventable) suffering caused by unmet material needs, political actions and the like.
I agree that this is the ideal response, but unfortunately this hasn't been the general result and I doubt it ever will be. When an animal learns (or is tricked) that its environment is more harsh and dangerous than it previously believed, its instinctive reaction is to become less trusting, less curious, more withdrawn, and very often more prone to anger and violence. Humans are no different by and large.
I think rates of poverty, starvation, rape, murder, etc. all disagree with you here.
But…
We see the suffering in our cities, poverty, homelessness, drug abuse, but nothing is done. We see endless wars, propagated by the United States around the world, but nothing is done. We see ever increasing homelessness, but nothing is done.
I think we’ve slowly been conditioned that there is someone else that’s supposed to do something, either a politician, or an organization, or or some administrator somewhere, so we just sit back and watch and watch and watch.
If you want to better deal with the suffering over the world, you need to act.
But I’m afraid we’ve let the sociopaths tell us what the correct way to behave is. Look out for yourself! Survival of the fittest!
I am under the very strong impression that "democracy" is what fixes such things, I've seen many charts and discussions asserting that claim.
Personally, I consider democracy to be mostly an obvious illusion/trick, so those who have fallen for it are kind of getting what they deserve for not listening to (if not outright mocking) warnings.
That is a vacuous claim without any alternative so support it. I too am not too satisfied with the options I had last elections where I lived, but that is the best we have right now.
Bonus question: who sets school curriculum, and may that have some relevance here?
It's more "the same thing that always happened happens now, just increased by the presence of the internet".
> "the same thing that always happened happens now, just increased by the presence of the internet".
Didn't you answer yourself? It's not that teens never had stress before, the article explores how they are coping with stress increase.
Comradery can lessen stress I'm sure.
The solution is obvious and simple...don't go online so much.
It's not nourishment. It's not protection. It's not procreation. It's a fucking slot machine, and the odds will *never* ve in your favor. Succumbing to FOMO is not going to fix and/or change anything.
The Truth is: The System is not designed for Us, it's designed for Them. (Note: There is a spectrum of Thems, choose your poison). To say the answer (i.e. memes) is more of the same (i.e., online is the problem) is naive at best. While I appreciate ppl trying to "self medicate" memes are an enabler. They are a beer & a shot sitting in front of an alcoholic. It's the inevidible waiting to happen. (Note: I'm not making light. Not at all. I have friends doing the 12 Steps. But having an internet hangover and going back for more and more...what is that???)
The point is, memes as a "cure" will only last so long. Eventually it won't be funny any more. The solution is to realize The System is not looking out fir you, and to overcome the gravity of FOMO.
I remember the White House under Obama studied how to instrumentalize them, and their instrumentalization got much worse during Trump. There is quite a bit of persuassive science behind them.
Memes do not meme well.
But when asked what people do about their innate insight they can only respond "Oh, I can only manage my finances telepathically and none of my friends have time to speak mouth to mouth anymore, their mental energy is always focused on something now."
And when asked about alternatives, "Oh, we can't just make it go away. We were born with it from the start and everyone relies on it to stay connected. And my children are given assignments where they exercise their PSI so they're obligated to use it. Then they spend a lot of time playing mind games after school with their friends. It will probably never go away, and I accept that."
I'm starting to think that successive generations will both live and die by advancing technology. It's a runaway force that no single organization is in control of, and that we cannot study the long-term effects of until everyone relies on it daily.
And just think about how many tech dependencies we don't have yet but are itching to give ourselves. A generation from now this could repeat itself when people generally consider LLMs useful enough to integrate into every fridge and ATM. Who will make that decision? It seems like when a few people make that decision for others, an acceptance loop begins where the tech is normalized over years until we stop asking ourselves how we got here at all. It no longer makes sense to wake up and see that you don't have a smartphone sitting on your nightstand anymore.