[MollyR]

When I volunteered at a suicide prevention center, I dealt with a ton of college grads who couldn't find jobs, and were depressed, suicidal and deep in debt. They said they felt alone, and their parents just thought they were lazy.

Maybe videogames are their only way to eke out some self-proclaimed happiness being a hero in some fake reality. But that happiness will quickly fade as they age, and they are forced to face reality in terms of resources needed for survival.

I think this also explains the rise of the extremist youth groups antifa and the alt-right. Both are dominated by young men looking for purpose and value.

edit: maybe also explains the rise of that jordan peterson guy.

[LMYahooTFY]

As far as Peterson goes, I've heard him point out the trend of young males paying attention to him and the potential link to feelings of dissolution/meaninglessness/lack of purpose. He seems to think these sets of hypothesis are on the right track.

Video games seem very similar to drugs in this regard. I've not seen evidence of video games being causal in any way, any more than drugs. I think it's more accurate to describe them as potential negative amplifiers; they're very easy to abuse because of how well they satiate the aforementioned feelings many people (notably young men) experience.

[verylittlemeat]

Does anyone else see huge similarities between what this paper is describing and the freeter/hikikomori/herbivore men trends going on in Japan since the late 1980s?

I don't have the time or inclination to look into it more deeply but it almost seems like the West is just living through a social reality that has been going on for decades in Japan. Maybe there are some interesting social and economic insights that can be gleaned from that change to predict the future in the west.

[toyg]

I was saying this in the late ‘90s. I would get out the relevant posts but they are in Italian anyway; I believe in Italy we saw the phenomenon a bit earlier because of a number of factors (the economy braked earlier than elsewhere, it’s a more traditionalist country than average, etc etc).

On the other hand, media and academia are always out to sensationalise. It’s entirely possible that a certain degree of social disaffection has always been there (see “young Werther”, Leopardi and so on), but the overall population growth was such that a small but constant percentage of a community is now a big number in absolute terms.

[Balgair]

If you are looking for a possible avenue out of the post-grad malaise I would suggest this site: https://strenuouslife.co/

It helped me, but it does take effort. I feel the folks there are genuine and trying hard, not scammers. Yes, the stuff there can seem a bit strange, but I think it helps. I'm not associated with the site nor make any cash from it. Yes, it's a bit expensive, I agree. That said, I think it is a good idea and can be worth the money if you put work into it too. Again, it's one road, not the road, but I think it's a really good road all the same.

[roymurdock]

As a 25 YO male this is an issue near and dear to me. IMO it all comes back to slow TFP [1] (total factor productivity) growth.

New technology is not (on aggregate) making us more productive, or growing the economy to the point where we need young, college educated men and women to learn productive new skills to sustain and grow our communities and the collective state and country level economy.

I went into the embedded industry to learn more about the people and companies that make all the things we take for granted or never think about as kids - cars, planes, industrial PLCs, oil rigs, pacemakers, insulin pumps, ATMs. Modern chip production, and what people have built from tiny MCUs and DSPs all the way up to the crazy beefy CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs is as close to magic as I've found in the real world.

But the industry of "global infrastructure" - transportation of people and goods, war, healthcare, manufacturing, resource extraction, retail - as a whole is stagnant. Especially when compared to the golden century we are just coming out of, when our standard of living in developed nations jumped up exponentially due to distributed electricity, indoor plumbing, modern appliances, transistors, data transmission technology, internal combustion engines, and advances in chemical and medical technology (much of this accelerated by research into war technology). Economist Robert Gordon has studied this in detail here [2].

Video games are definitely a way to feel productive, achieve well-defined goals, and get a sense of accomplishment or progression that is often lacking in the workplace. But IMO in many cases they are a symptom of a larger issue, not a cause.

There are many forms of escapism, video games are just one that my generation is more accustomed to having grown up and made friends through social interactions over video games alongside traditional things like sports, clubs, parties, etc.

The growing need for escapism is IMO the larger issue.

[1] In economics TFP is a variable that attempts to capture the effect of technology and infrastructure on the production function. Since these effects are much too complex and indirect to calculate explicitly (how many more widgets can a factory produce because of the roads that allow their workers to drive into work from the suburbs?) it is imputed as a residual. http://www.karlwhelan.com/Macro2/Notes9.pdf

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-American-Growth-Princeton/d...

[RealityVoid]

I also work in embedded and this issue is also dear to me, seeing how I've been there dealing with doubt and uncertainty for the future and my place as a young man in this world.

That being said, I think that your view is wrong and that tfp _has_ been growing and we have become better at productivity. It's just that is was very localized, the inequalities in productivity are very high and a whole class of people that used to be productive are not anymore(because of various and very complex reasons). Also, I think we, as a species have become complacent and some of us are wired to function better in "crysis" mode than in a normal world. Maybe being normal is one of our contemporary ailments

[roymurdock]

Data doesn’t support the idea that an increasingly few productivity superstars in crisis mode can push TFP forward:

https://www2.deloitte./insights/us/en/economy/behind-the-num...