In a supposedly very conservative red state, Arkansas, the recent TV ad message run by the GOP candidate was “young men who are gaming at home and eating Cheetos all day are why we had to implement work requirements for welfare”; it was a very negative ad that made young men look like slackers, layabouts etc.
Of course, only about one percent of welfare recipients are young men; single moms in middle age are the ones who are a large percentage of those receiving the benefits, for very different reasons than Cheetos consumption.
But it shows how attacking young men when they aren’t even the crux of the problem is en vogue.
BTW House Speaker Johnson has said the same thing on TV about young men.
The job market has collapsed, graduates are moving back in with their parents, dating is a non-starter for most, nobody born after the 2000s can afford homes, the future looks bleak
Curious why dating is a non-starter. Looks - or rather appeal - is always a distribution and probably similar between men and women so historically there's always been a match for anyone. Mostly. What's different now? Have expectations changed in either gender (or both).
Higher standards introduced by social media and dating apps. Back then you were competing with the people in your group for a mate, now you're competing against the top 10% of the city or even the passport bros of the world.
> Oliffe said that in the last decade, there has been "low government investment in men's mental health."
When has it ever been otherwise? Was there some past time I've forgotten about where government spending on men's mental health was high?
I'm just not convinced by this article. Male teens are moody and anxious? Seems pretty normal. That was me in the 1980s for sure. We had no idea what the future held, other than we'd probably all be nuked at some point pretty soon.
The point about gambling is hard to argue against. Abolishing (or simply stopping enforcement of) various gambling bans around the world, especially those specifically scoped for the youth, is a fairly recent development. Upholding those bans took constant investment - the incentives to tear down the protections were always there.
All promising the "get rich quick" ride. One time it was casting shows promising a stratospheric music career. Then it was YouTube/streaming, then it was crypto and (hah) NFTs. And then it's collectible everything (cards, shoes, whatever other dumbass idea).
And for young women it's predatory OnlyFans "agents" encouraging them to be virtual sex workers.
There's probably research about where the money went when lockdown meant no going out and no consuming, while the government gave taxpayers some thousands of dollars of emergency funding...
Reading your comment has just brought to mind the sheer amount of betting and stock trading ads I get on YouTube currently. I’m in my late 30s so a little out of the “young males” category.
"Data from the Canadian Medical Association Journal shows a huge rise in young men calling helplines with gambling addictions. (Health Canada reports men are three times more likely than women to have a gambling problem.)
Canada legalized single-event sports betting in 2021. In 2022, Ontario became the first province to allow private companies to operate alongside government-regulated industry."
------------
We've come to recognize "young men" (males aged 15-24) as a "useful" demographic in the sense that they are impulsive, easily coerced, and have access to financial capital. The same things that make this demographic good for fighting wars makes them exploitable by gambling sites and influencers, and their entry into the work-force during this window gives them access to money without the experience needed to hang onto it.
Being specifically targeted by peddlers of scams and addiction is probably about as good for your mental health as being viewed as expendable manpower for war and industry. The fact that there are helplines and young men are actually reaching out to them is a good sign. Perhaps we're finally breaking down the tradition of stoic silence. However, we still need to take steps to protect young people from those who are deliberately exploiting them.
Sports betting and online gambling need to be strictly regulated, and their ads banned. That's something concrete that would leave young men (and some women) with one less problem at absolutely no cost to the rest of society.
It's because they're rational. The American dream is dead, and the Canadian one is too. You can work your entire life with nothing to show for it. Never escaping a landlord. No time or money or third places to have a life. Women don't want children in this environment. The worst people are leading and in control of society. The insatiable greed of billionaires ruined whatever was good about the social compact. Families torn apart by the lies shown to them by Zuckerberg and co. No time for friends. Can't even build a PC because Sam Altman bought all of the compute.
Your post resonates, and yet nostalgia is a powerful force. Was life ever really good? After all, there were issues even during peak post-war Americana from civil rights unrest to Cold War "you could be nuked any day now" anxiety.
OTOH institutions were actually strong, and wealth-inequality not-that-bad prior to the 1980's.... Personally, I think SCOTUS and Citizens United are the root cause of recent decline. Money-in-politics has made inept, corrupt gerontocracy unassailable and safe in their unaccountable malfeasance. A revolution is needed, how sad a fentanyl- and social-media-addled American public picked an even more corrupt old man to fix a corrupt old man problem.
This is my understanding. A big part of the decline of mental health is simply a decline of the state of the things we value in Western society, and people observing the delta.
I mean, yes, there are some explicit attacks on mental health: Social media, gambling, etc. And yes, we are not investing enough in mental health directly. But frankly, the notion that those are what's driving the crisis is just ignoring the obvious, presumably because the obvious problems are intractable unless we have some conversations that are very scary for leaders.
I'm actually writin an article about youth mental health for my substack. I'll post it on HN when it's done, but the tl;dr is that the evidence for the youth mental health crisis is very thin at best. Despite what this article says, the youth suicide rate in Canada is near its all-time low. Self-reported youth distress is up, but our only 2 datapoints are 2012 and 2022 (middle of the pandemic). Every group has also reported worsening mental health, and the adult suicide rate is (and always has been) much worse than the youth suicide rate. I don't think mental health isn't a serious concern, but I don't buy the idea that young people specifically have some major crisis while everybody else is doing fine.
I also quickly thought of bias when I read this, and that concern was reinforced by the bit about substance abuse rates in male-predominant fields of work. I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that has been the case for a very long time.
Another way to interpret the data might be, "When interviewed by researchers, men talked more openly about their feelings than they did a decade ago."
Spot the non-programmer in the room :) The two negatives apply to different things. One is how they feel about the mental health situation and the other is the mental health situation so it reads just fine. Of course it could be reworded but was it really that hard to parse?
I find this hard to believe without seeing the data. I finished high school when the first iPhone was released. It was absolutely awful for me and many folks I grew up with.
I cannot imagine how much more difficult it would have been with social media and cameras everywhere like it is today.
> I don't buy the idea that young people specifically have some major crisis while everybody else is doing fine
You can't imagine the stress and anxiety that is fabricated by immature minds from being on the internet all of the time?
I appreciate your critical analysis of the topic, even if you turn out to be incorrect in the end! I'll definitely read your article when it's posted, if I can remember (or if perhaps I can subscribe?)
It's thin because we don't have enough data to say otherwise and everyone else is doing worse? Go get more data then before negating the signals and the two confirming data points we have. I "don't buy" is not a reason. It could be everyone is doing worse and men are doing worse than most (or impacted the most), those are not mutually exclusive.
Is it just the young men whose mental health is declining? I'd go a generation earlier and see how things start to get pretty bad. A lot of kids these days don't hang out in person, they are hanging out virtually while laying down in their beds or in comfortable chairs in front of their consoles or computers playing video games online. This is quite unealthy way to grow up. A lot of teenagers, male or female are also undetachable from their cellphones and social media too. This is also a very unhealthy way to grow up.
In a supposedly very conservative red state, Arkansas, the recent TV ad message run by the GOP candidate was “young men who are gaming at home and eating Cheetos all day are why we had to implement work requirements for welfare”; it was a very negative ad that made young men look like slackers, layabouts etc.
Of course, only about one percent of welfare recipients are young men; single moms in middle age are the ones who are a large percentage of those receiving the benefits, for very different reasons than Cheetos consumption.
But it shows how attacking young men when they aren’t even the crux of the problem is en vogue.
BTW House Speaker Johnson has said the same thing on TV about young men.
Did they ever stop blaming video games?
The job market has collapsed, graduates are moving back in with their parents, dating is a non-starter for most, nobody born after the 2000s can afford homes, the future looks bleak
Curious why dating is a non-starter. Looks - or rather appeal - is always a distribution and probably similar between men and women so historically there's always been a match for anyone. Mostly. What's different now? Have expectations changed in either gender (or both).
There's a famous OkCupid study that showed 20% of men got 80% of the matches. Other dating apps have a similar skew.
>Mostly. What's different now?
Higher standards introduced by social media and dating apps. Back then you were competing with the people in your group for a mate, now you're competing against the top 10% of the city or even the passport bros of the world.
> Oliffe said that in the last decade, there has been "low government investment in men's mental health."
When has it ever been otherwise? Was there some past time I've forgotten about where government spending on men's mental health was high?
I'm just not convinced by this article. Male teens are moody and anxious? Seems pretty normal. That was me in the 1980s for sure. We had no idea what the future held, other than we'd probably all be nuked at some point pretty soon.
The point about gambling is hard to argue against. Abolishing (or simply stopping enforcement of) various gambling bans around the world, especially those specifically scoped for the youth, is a fairly recent development. Upholding those bans took constant investment - the incentives to tear down the protections were always there.
One thing I've noticed: the amount of gambling ads targeted towards young males; kinda wild. I'm glad that I'm not growing up in this era.
All promising the "get rich quick" ride. One time it was casting shows promising a stratospheric music career. Then it was YouTube/streaming, then it was crypto and (hah) NFTs. And then it's collectible everything (cards, shoes, whatever other dumbass idea).
And for young women it's predatory OnlyFans "agents" encouraging them to be virtual sex workers.
There's probably research about where the money went when lockdown meant no going out and no consuming, while the government gave taxpayers some thousands of dollars of emergency funding...
Reading your comment has just brought to mind the sheer amount of betting and stock trading ads I get on YouTube currently. I’m in my late 30s so a little out of the “young males” category.
Seems like ads for sporting events and sports podcasts annd jersey sponsors are asymptotically approaching 100%.
It's like the VCs are trying to make the AfD win.
"Data from the Canadian Medical Association Journal shows a huge rise in young men calling helplines with gambling addictions. (Health Canada reports men are three times more likely than women to have a gambling problem.)
Canada legalized single-event sports betting in 2021. In 2022, Ontario became the first province to allow private companies to operate alongside government-regulated industry."
------------
We've come to recognize "young men" (males aged 15-24) as a "useful" demographic in the sense that they are impulsive, easily coerced, and have access to financial capital. The same things that make this demographic good for fighting wars makes them exploitable by gambling sites and influencers, and their entry into the work-force during this window gives them access to money without the experience needed to hang onto it.
Being specifically targeted by peddlers of scams and addiction is probably about as good for your mental health as being viewed as expendable manpower for war and industry. The fact that there are helplines and young men are actually reaching out to them is a good sign. Perhaps we're finally breaking down the tradition of stoic silence. However, we still need to take steps to protect young people from those who are deliberately exploiting them.
Sports betting and online gambling need to be strictly regulated, and their ads banned. That's something concrete that would leave young men (and some women) with one less problem at absolutely no cost to the rest of society.
It's because they're rational. The American dream is dead, and the Canadian one is too. You can work your entire life with nothing to show for it. Never escaping a landlord. No time or money or third places to have a life. Women don't want children in this environment. The worst people are leading and in control of society. The insatiable greed of billionaires ruined whatever was good about the social compact. Families torn apart by the lies shown to them by Zuckerberg and co. No time for friends. Can't even build a PC because Sam Altman bought all of the compute.
Your post resonates, and yet nostalgia is a powerful force. Was life ever really good? After all, there were issues even during peak post-war Americana from civil rights unrest to Cold War "you could be nuked any day now" anxiety.
OTOH institutions were actually strong, and wealth-inequality not-that-bad prior to the 1980's.... Personally, I think SCOTUS and Citizens United are the root cause of recent decline. Money-in-politics has made inept, corrupt gerontocracy unassailable and safe in their unaccountable malfeasance. A revolution is needed, how sad a fentanyl- and social-media-addled American public picked an even more corrupt old man to fix a corrupt old man problem.
> Citizens United
I agree.
Include ranked choice or quadratic voting + repeal CU and a lot of things could improve quickly.
Terms limited to 25 years and age 65 at time of election.
This is my understanding. A big part of the decline of mental health is simply a decline of the state of the things we value in Western society, and people observing the delta.
I mean, yes, there are some explicit attacks on mental health: Social media, gambling, etc. And yes, we are not investing enough in mental health directly. But frankly, the notion that those are what's driving the crisis is just ignoring the obvious, presumably because the obvious problems are intractable unless we have some conversations that are very scary for leaders.
Kind of hilarious to see the downvotes without comment. Guess you got your nvidia stock early. Everything is fine!
I'm actually writin an article about youth mental health for my substack. I'll post it on HN when it's done, but the tl;dr is that the evidence for the youth mental health crisis is very thin at best. Despite what this article says, the youth suicide rate in Canada is near its all-time low. Self-reported youth distress is up, but our only 2 datapoints are 2012 and 2022 (middle of the pandemic). Every group has also reported worsening mental health, and the adult suicide rate is (and always has been) much worse than the youth suicide rate. I don't think mental health isn't a serious concern, but I don't buy the idea that young people specifically have some major crisis while everybody else is doing fine.
I also quickly thought of bias when I read this, and that concern was reinforced by the bit about substance abuse rates in male-predominant fields of work. I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that has been the case for a very long time.
Another way to interpret the data might be, "When interviewed by researchers, men talked more openly about their feelings than they did a decade ago."
> I don't think mental health isn't a serious concern
Double negative makes this hard to read
Spot the non-programmer in the room :) The two negatives apply to different things. One is how they feel about the mental health situation and the other is the mental health situation so it reads just fine. Of course it could be reworded but was it really that hard to parse?
It may be easier to read that line as "I'm not saying mental health is totally fine"
"I think mental health is a serious concern."
That's the clearest version. Just drop the negatives.
I find this hard to believe without seeing the data. I finished high school when the first iPhone was released. It was absolutely awful for me and many folks I grew up with.
I cannot imagine how much more difficult it would have been with social media and cameras everywhere like it is today.
> I don't buy the idea that young people specifically have some major crisis while everybody else is doing fine
You can't imagine the stress and anxiety that is fabricated by immature minds from being on the internet all of the time?
I appreciate your critical analysis of the topic, even if you turn out to be incorrect in the end! I'll definitely read your article when it's posted, if I can remember (or if perhaps I can subscribe?)
What's this argument?
It's thin because we don't have enough data to say otherwise and everyone else is doing worse? Go get more data then before negating the signals and the two confirming data points we have. I "don't buy" is not a reason. It could be everyone is doing worse and men are doing worse than most (or impacted the most), those are not mutually exclusive.
Is it just the young men whose mental health is declining? I'd go a generation earlier and see how things start to get pretty bad. A lot of kids these days don't hang out in person, they are hanging out virtually while laying down in their beds or in comfortable chairs in front of their consoles or computers playing video games online. This is quite unealthy way to grow up. A lot of teenagers, male or female are also undetachable from their cellphones and social media too. This is also a very unhealthy way to grow up.
"experts warn"