[kthartic]

As someone who you'd probably refer to as one of the "younger folks", I think part of it is a coping mechanism. The outside world looks incredibly bleak. Most of my friends and housemates appear burnt out or have a depressed outlook on the state of the world - politics, global warming, house/rent prices, crumbling healthcare, dating (which in today's world means swiping on an app), competitive work life, social pressures (exacerbated by instagram, tiktok, etc), gym, seemingly no time in the world to do anything.

Perhaps it's just because I live in London, but this a snapshot of my social circle right now. It's also no secret that the West is suffering from a mental health crisis.

With the weight of the world looming over me, a nice meal for lunch is about the only thing keeping me together (being slightly sarcastic here).

I do wonder, was it always this way? Genuine question - did you ever feel this way in your 20s/30s? Did your friends?

[duxup]

We didn't have the same ... internet selling us on doom and gloom. Not saying that there aren't legit concerns, but I think the internet and its citizens certainly promote, reward, and consume negativity more than anything else. It skews things.

I worry a lot of folks just sort of live in the reality they consume on the internet, don't make their own space of sorts.

[kthartic]

I would definitely agree with you there, but I also can't blame people for consuming such media. It's incredibly difficult to bury your head in the sand/avoid all media in today's ultra-connected world. Even if I were to ditch my phone, my friends would still be talking about it.

I hope though my perspective in my earlier comment might give you some insight into the general psyche of (at least some) younger folks.

[SoftTalker]

Yes, young people feel the future is uncertain and that can be scary. It has always been this way. It might be worse today because you have a device in your pocket that is interested in keeping you anxious and clicking/swiping/scrolling compulsively. If you don't make an effort to control it, it will just suck you down a dark path.

My approach to this is:

- Stop watching the news, or paying attention to politics. You have almost certainly no control over anything they are reporting and almost none of it affects you in any way. I didn't pay any attention to the presidential race, for example. None of it was going to change my vote. I didn't watch the election night coverage; I watched a ball game and went to bed. I figured I'd hear the outcome the next day, I had zero control over it anyway so why stress about it?

- Cut down on social media. It's unnatural and unhealthy. Do more stuff that requires face-to-face interactions with people. Use social media as a communications tool to set this stuff up, but don't follow celebrities or people you don't know personally. Turn off all alerts that are not from your personal contacts. Don't like or forward memes. Try going places without your phone, to build up comfort at being without it or not constantly checking it. You know that until 15-20 years ago almost nobody had a phone when they were away from home.

[kthartic]

These are things that I know intuitively but sometimes we need to be reminded. Thanks, appreciate it :)

[mandevil]

When I was in my 20's George W Bush was president of the US, Tony Blair was supporting him 100% on the importance of invading Iraq, and then when I was 26 the bottom dropped out of the economy in the worst economic crash since 1929. So yeah, life wasn't great! Part of why now seems worse is that underlying trends kept getting worse- both US specific things like healthcare and college loans, plus things across the Anglosphere like real estate, and things across the world like climate- but I think a bigger part of it is the lack of real alternatives and the "End of History."

It seems clear to me that the 1930's everyone was down too: between The Great War, the Influenza Pandemic, and then the Great Depression everyone was clear that the world was on the wrong track and couldn't continue the way it was going. Depending on their particular biases, lots of people ended up thinking Fascism was the answer, and lots others thought that Communism was the answer, but not nearly as many thought that (small-l) liberal democratic capitalism was the way to keep going- the world of 1932 seemed to discredit that entire mode of living. A fascinating book _Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time_ by Ira Katznelson argues that the American leaders who built the New Deal were aware of that, and that they created the New Deal in conscious opposition to either Fascism or Communism. Unless they acted RIGHT NOW, with a response of sufficient scale to offer something better one or the other would inevitably take power.

And today, decades after the end of the Cold War, leaders and people largely can't conceptualize any other way of organizing people and power, and if they do it's largely in dystopic stuff like "what if companies ruled everything." (This is what Francis Fukuyama meant by the End of History, not that events would stop but that the great struggle of how best to organize people and power was decided and capitalism and democracy won.) Which has meant that we're right back in the same situation, but no one seems to be taking seriously the threat of losing the fruits of the Enlightenment, so they aren't acting with sufficient vigor or scale to deal with the scope of the problem.