Thanks to bestselling authors like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, the public has become increasingly aware of the rapid rise in mental health issues among younger people [...] Their warnings about the destructive impact of social media have had an effect, reflected not least in a wave of schools across Europe banning smartphones.
While it’s good to draw attention to the rising rates of depression and anxiety, there’s a risk of becoming fixated on simplistic explanations that reduce the issue to technical variables like “screen time”.
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A hallmark of Twenge and Haidt’s arguments is their use of trend lines for various types of psychological distress, showing increases after 2012, which Haidt calls the start of the “great rewiring” when smartphones became widespread. This method has been criticised for overemphasising correlations that may say little about causality.
[...]
Numerous academics [...] have pointed to factors such as an increasing intolerance for uncertainty in modernity, a fixation – both individual and collective – on avoiding risk, intensifying feelings of meaninglessness in work and life more broadly and rising national inequality accompanied by growing status anxiety. However, it’s important to emphasise that social science has so far failed to provide definitive answers.
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It seems unlikely that the political and social challenges we face wouldn’t influence our wellbeing. Reducing the issue to isolated variables [such as the use of smartphones], where the solution might appear to be to introduce a new policy (like banning smartphones) follows a technocratic logic that could turn good health into a matter for experts.
The risk with this approach is that society as a whole is excluded from the analysis. Another risk is that politics is drained of meaning. If political questions such as structural discrimination, economic precarity, exposure to violence and opioid use are not regarded as shaping our wellbeing, what motivation remains for taking action on these matters?
Yeah, and you don't need to think on your own. Whatever the problem is, the cause is always the same. No mistake possible.
I just want people to be happy and to not get exploited. As far as I know, people have been exploited under both capitalism and communism. I am not sure if it's inherent to either economic structure, if there are safe guardrails you can put on either to make them not harmful, if it's not inherent to the economic structure and what matters is also what other government type is happening alongside that economic structure, etc. Something that really doesn't help is that often, if you grow up with one structure, you're also taught the other one is a virus of evil that no good human being would ever support. Well, maybe a misguided one, but nobody good and smart who thinks for themselves.
It would be nice to see a civil discussion with people actually trying to figure out which one is best and least harmful, because as an outsider looking in all I see is
"capitalism is the problem"
"no it's not, also you're not a free thinker"
Is everyone coming in here with some prior knowledge I don't have? Is there somewhere where people have tried to have this civil discussion that I could look at where it stayed civil?
I do think one thing I can certainly say is that there are people who lived under communism who worked hard and tried their best and still suffered in poverty under it and wanted out. And there are people who lived under capitalism who worked hard and tried their best and still suffered in poverty under it and wanted out.
Communist governments took power in poor countries and had to endure 'primitive accumulation' before they could start building a socialist economy. At best they created workers' states where employment and basic services were guaranteed to all.
Where was that?