How much are teenage alienation and estrangement still things today?

[Rounin Ryuuji]

You are ignoring another possibility - things have always been bad, in one way or another, but people have bad memories, so they have rose-tinted views of the past, and they find things such as social media (or TV) (or gangsta rap) (or books) to blame what they perceive as being a bad present on. Sure, some things have been better in the past, but other things have been worse, but people only remember the parts that were better.

Am I? I'm not talking about why despair seems higher now than in, say, some past century where things weren't demonstrably worse, or at least visibly declining, from the standard they had reached within living memory. That things are economically more bleak today than in about 1990 for the average person in the United States (note, again, the generational wealth gap), resulting in a lost generation (a milder form of what happened to Japan, which also seems to be a high-despair society) simply is, whether we like it or not. Some elements of society may have improved — as people, we seem to be better, but as an economy, we seem to be worse. The things that were not good in the past were not bad in ways that caused (at least to the people I know to have such despair now) such intense existential duress as would appear to exist now. Can I get married now to a partner who would actually suit me? Yes. Do I have a chance at buying a house in the near future? Not really. Is this owing to some personal failing? I do not think I am lazy, or broadly inept. I'm probably not the nicest person, but I'm also not violent, cruel, or actively spiteful (even if I might think petty thoughts sometime). Do most of the people of my own age I have encountered have such glaring character flaws? A few, but not most, and far from all. Certainly, losing faith in the future is a greater driver of despair than hashtags or long-distance communication on such a massive scale.

[Travis B.]

You are ignoring another possibility - things have always been bad, in one way or another, but people have bad memories, so they have rose-tinted views of the past, and they find things such as social media (or TV) (or gangsta rap) (or books) to blame what they perceive as being a bad present on. Sure, some things have been better in the past, but other things have been worse, but people only remember the parts that were better.

Am I? I'm not talking about why despair seems higher now than in, say, some past century where things weren't demonstrably worse, or at least visibly declining, from the standard they had reached within living memory. That things are economically more bleak today than in about 1990 for the average person in the United States (note, again, the generational wealth gap), resulting in a lost generation (a milder form of what happened to Japan, which also seems to be a high-despair society) simply is, whether we like it or not. Some elements of society may have improved — as people, we seem to be better, but as an economy, we seem to be worse. The things that were not good in the past were not bad in ways that caused (at least to the people I know to have such despair now) such intense existential duress as would appear to exist now. Can I get married now to a partner who would actually suit me? Yes. Do I have a chance at buying a house in the near future? Not really. Is this owing to some personal failing? I do not think I am lazy, or broadly inept. I'm probably not the nicest person, but I'm also not violent, cruel, or actively spiteful (even if I might think petty thoughts sometime). Do most of the people of my own age I have encountered have such glaring character flaws? A few, but not most, and far from all. Certainly, losing faith in the future is a greater driver of despair than hashtags or long-distance communication on such a massive scale.

But consider the 1970's - back then we had stagflation, the oil crisis, a stronger sense of a nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over our heads than now (even considering the war in Ukraine), we were just starting to phase out leaded gasoline, until just recently crime rates were higher then, and so on. Things weren't uniformly better in the past, and from what I have read about the 1970's people really were not happy about things then. However, most younger people who did not grow up in the 1970's never learned how things were back then.

[azhong]

If one wants to feel alienated and estranged, I think they can always find good reasons to have those feelings anytime anywhere. On the other hand, so would be the case if one wants to feel they are in an air of caring and loving one another. That's my personal thought as a 50+-year-old person with the support of Buddhism. One can always choose a viewpoint they want to focus on to describe their situations. Always, period.
As for the adolescent, they are a special group, in the process of forming their life thoughts and belief, and thus needed to be leaded.

Don't ban me just because what I've said! XD

[Raphael]

I am the perfect test subject, because the internet appeared while I was becoming an adult,

Oh, the same applies to me. I was mainly wondering about the impact of the internet on those who are growing up after it became common.

Suicide rates among teens have remained stable, but other indicators of mental health are worsening. One under-appreciated fact is that teenagers aren't fucking each other any more. I reject any attempt to reframe this as a good thing.

You know, I've sometimes had my disagreements with you, but on this point, we can completely agree.

I think Raphael's question is inspired by the fact that traditional outlets for teenage rebellion like playing unwholesome music or occupying Kent State are less visible,

To a large extent, I was wondering about what pitfalls I'd have to avoid if I ever tried to write a story in which some of the characters would be modern teenagers.

[hwhatting]

Moose-Tache is certainly right in that much more attention is paid to mental health issues nowadays, and they're also discussed much more openly. When I grew up in the 70s, to caricature it a bid, "having mental health issues" was an euphemism for being loony crazy, and the response to any issues below that level, if people dared to bring up their issues at all, was "get a grip". There was much more of a societal expectation to signal that all is fine than there is today.
A second thing is that adolescence is by its nature the period when people are at least partially trying to become less reliant on their parents and elders and to find their place in life, which isn't easy. On one hand, it may have been less complicated in traditional societies where your life path was clear from the moment you were born and where you had to rely on your family / clan and obey your parents your entire life, but on the other hand the absence of choices must also have been stifling.
A third point concerns the present period - it's not an original thought that happiness depends less on one's objective circumstances and more on how you compare to others and what perspectives you see for yourself. And also it's not an original idea that the prespective that one can do as well as or better than the previous generation in terms of living standards, which sustained previous generations, seems to have been lost.
This is of course all very impressionistic; Maybe someone has statistics on how current teens compare to Teens in previous decades?

[Rounin Ryuuji]

But consider the 1970's - back then we had stagflation, the oil crisis, a stronger sense of a nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over our heads than now (even considering the war in Ukraine), we were just starting to phase out leaded gasoline, until just recently crime rates were higher then, and so on. Things weren't uniformly better in the past, and from what I have read about the 1970's people really were not happy about things then. However, most younger people who did not grow up in the 1970's never learned how things were back then.

So you did. And then things improved for a good little while, and then they dropped off dramatically again. The mechanics of stagflation now (which seem to be internal policy failures, as well as corporate price-gouging) seem to be quite different from the mix of factors that led to it in the 1970s. The 1970s were also pre-Reagan. Reaganomics have, quite noticeably, returned us to a far more stratified and unequal society, and enabled a massive amount of wealth-hoarding and antitrust violations. The economy does not seem like it is likely to get any better in the future without drastic and dramatic interventions that do not seem forthcoming.

The job market itself now is positively terrible. The housing market is virtually impossible for anybody younger than 40 to break into. The generational wealth gap is far larger. People might not have been happy about things back then, but that does not mean they do not feel more despair now because of economic factors not indicating to them that they have much of a future to look forward to. The Internet may have helped us to "lift the painted veil", of course, but I would expect the same economic factors to produce roughly the same results (less the problems caused by Social Media) without the presence of the Internet.

A third point concerns the present period - it's not an original thought that happiness depends less on one's objective circumstances and more on how you compare to others and what perspectives you see for yourself. And also it's not an original idea that the prespective that one can do as well as or better than the previous generation in terms of living standards, which sustained previous generations, seems to have been lost.

It isn't an unoriginal thought, but it is a rather silly one. One can only be expected to rationalise away so many objections to the various problems one faces; expecting to do as well as the previous generation (broadly speaking) is a reasonable expectation, and if factors of policy are preventing it, it's more reasonable to fight that, and to spread the idea that it is wrong, rather than to simply grin and bear it, or to try to use magical thinking to make it seem all right.

[doctor shark]

For much of the mid-to-late 20th century, at least in the Western World, a lot of teenagers were feeling alienated and estranged from their surroundings. Often, they thought they'd rather be in any other place, or even at any other time, than the place and time in which they actually lived. I certainly sometimes felt that way when I was growing up in the 1990s, and many members of the generations shortly before mine clearly did, too.

But that was before the internet, or, in my case, during the early phase of the internet. Back then, if you knew few or no people more or less like yourself in real life, you knew few or no people more or less like yourself, period. If you had no one to talk to about your hobbies and interests in real life, you had no one to talk to about your hobbies and interests, period. If there was nothing to do where you lived in real life, there was nothing to do, period.

Now, you should theoretically be able to meet tons of people like yourself, who share your hobbies and interests, online, and also to spend a lot of time in online places if you don't know what to do in your place in real life. Of course, the internet is often dysfunctional, sometimes extremely so. But I wonder to which extent the frustrations of growing up have changed from being about isolation to being about internet dysfunction.

For as long as I can remember, I've always felt a sense of "alienation", particularly growing up in the circumstances I did. With my father in the military, we moved around a lot, but even when we stayed in one place the people we were with would come and go. From kindergarten through sixth grade when I lived in Germany, I had a different group of classmates and friends every year; it's so great when you don't know if a friend's going to be around the next year and knowing there's an expiration date on your stay somewhere! And these days were all pre-proliferation of the internet, where connections were through dial-up (at best). The two moves after that (to Tex-ass and to North Carolina) also didn't help: the culture shock of not having been exposed to mainstream American culture for six years, having to break into social circles where I was unfamiliar, also realizing there'd be a (possible) expiration date on those stays as well... and my teenage years were in the early 2000's, so also pre-smartphones.

A good thing with social media (for me) is the not losing connections: mail is slow, phone calls in those days were expensive (especially Germany to the US!), visiting relatives could/can be extremely costly... though my view might also be tinted by both my experience with moving as much as I have and being a queer person whose teenage years were in the quite conservative southern US.

Maybe some of the alienation isn't so much now wishing that you were somewhere else, but maybe it's now knowing that things can be different than what they are where you are.

[MacAnDàil]

This is of course all very impressionistic; Maybe someone has statistics on how current teens compare to Teens in previous decades?

That is exactly what Jean Twenge did in her book iGens.

[Raphael]

For as long as I can remember, I've always felt a sense of "alienation", particularly growing up in the circumstances I did. With my father in the military, we moved around a lot, but even when we stayed in one place the people we were with would come and go. From kindergarten through sixth grade when I lived in Germany, I had a different group of classmates and friends every year; it's so great when you don't know if a friend's going to be around the next year and knowing there's an expiration date on your stay somewhere! And these days were all pre-proliferation of the internet, where connections were through dial-up (at best). The two moves after that (to Tex-ass and to North Carolina) also didn't help: the culture shock of not having been exposed to mainstream American culture for six years,

Thank you for sharing your story. I am, however, a bit confused. I you were in Germany because your father was in the military, wouldn't that mean that you went to garrison schools, where you would still be surrounded by mainstream US culture?

[azhong]

With my father in the military, we moved around a lot, but even when we stayed in one place the people we were with would come and go. From kindergarten through sixth grade when I lived in Germany, I had a different group of classmates and friends every year; it's so great when you don't know if a friend's going to be around the next year and knowing there's an expiration date on your stay somewhere!

It's really an unpleasant experience for a child to move again and again during their school period. It takes away the opportunity to develop deeper friendship, and it's always more challenging to get acquainted with new classmates than getting along with familiar ones, let along the cultural shock.

[doctor shark]

For as long as I can remember, I've always felt a sense of "alienation", particularly growing up in the circumstances I did. With my father in the military, we moved around a lot, but even when we stayed in one place the people we were with would come and go. From kindergarten through sixth grade when I lived in Germany, I had a different group of classmates and friends every year; it's so great when you don't know if a friend's going to be around the next year and knowing there's an expiration date on your stay somewhere! And these days were all pre-proliferation of the internet, where connections were through dial-up (at best). The two moves after that (to Tex-ass and to North Carolina) also didn't help: the culture shock of not having been exposed to mainstream American culture for six years,

Thank you for sharing your story. I am, however, a bit confused. I you were in Germany because your father was in the military, wouldn't that mean that you went to garrison schools, where you would still be surrounded by mainstream US culture?

I did, yes. We had three hours a week of German classes (honestly, my favorite parts of the week!), but the curriculum was still a generalized American curriculum.

However, schools are only a small part of socialization and culture: there's also a major influence from media. Military bases, especially overseas, are very much a special place: back in those days, we only had two or three American TV channels (that they had to strip the commercials from the programming for) with a quite limited selection of programming, so the only other English-language programming that was available was British. The stores on the military base were quite limited in their selections of all sorts of products: not to say, for example, the on-base grocery store wasn't well-equipped (it was), but the shop selections were quite selective and geared more towards the soldiers. Movies... well, you were lucky if they made it to the on-base cinema (if they did, it was two or three months after the initial release), and the one off-base cinema that consistently had VO titles in English was about an hour away by driving (and fairly expensive by the standards of the day). Music was maybe the closest thing that was similar, but even still then Rap, R&B, and Hip-Hop hadn't broken into Germany and the UK at that point like they had in the US.

The cumulative effect of this was that, while schooling was American, a lot of the other media socialization I had in terms of media was this strange mix of German and British with some American splashed in as well as other European due to all the travel we did: every summer, save one, we always travelled, be it to Italy, the Netherlands, France, the UK... so having had those experiences made it all the harder to relate to my cohort. Especially being seen as coming from Germany, even though I wasn't (granted, I had tenuous connections, at best, to the two other places I'd lived by that point...).

More: show

Another small thing was that some of the sub-cultures (especially American rap culture at that time) just didn't get a foothold on the military base in my age group, and part of that was the sponsorship system. Under the German–US Status of Forces Agreements (SOFA), to live in Germany, you had to have a sponsor to be exempted from German immigration laws (and some other things, but the big one was immigration law). My father's sponsor was the military base; my mother's, my brother's, and mine were my father's. If dependents were poorly behaved, their sponsorship was revoked and they had to leave. Naturally, this was a bit of a nuclear option, but the big thing was that a revoked sponsorship of a dependent didn't mean the servicemember could leave Germany: they had to stay, and the person whose sponsorship was cancelled had to leave Germany. The effect really was that, if there were perceived problems, those problems were sent elsewhere.

It's really an unpleasant experience for a child to move again and again during their school period. It takes away the opportunity to develop deeper friendship, and it's always more challenging to get acquainted with new classmates than getting along with familiar ones, let along the cultural shock.

It's true, and actually I had it easy in that regard: I only moved three times during my school age, and two of those times were at "breaks" when I would've moved to a new school. (Moved during kindergarten; right after 6th grade; and right after 8th grade and before entering high school.) I knew some families that moved every three or four years, and up until about 2000, the military had no qualms about moving the family in the middle of the school year. (After about then, they would give short-term extensions to allow kids to finish a grade.) At the same time, I'm very happy with all the out-of-school experiences I had during that period... but the schooling was, in retrospect, hard.

[Curlyjimsam]

I had a lot of contact with "people like me" as a teenager via this forum and others to do with fandoms. I'm not sure it decreased my sense of alienation in real life. If anything it increased it (because it encouraged the sorts of hobbies that made me feel different - I wouldn't have got into conlanging or fanfiction or 1960s television in the same way if it wasn't for having online communities to share this stuff with).

I expect there are nuances to the "the effects of social media are bad" argument that are often missed when it's talked about casually. Different platforms work very differently and different people use them differently. I've used most platforms to connect with real life friends and that can create feelings of being left out. Whereas Twitter - where I mostly interact with people I don't know in real life - tends to get me down about political matters much more, though I've now done a lot to filter out problematic topics. And more visual platforms contribute more to negative feelings about physical appearance, etc.

[Ares Land]

This is of course all very impressionistic; Maybe someone has statistics on how current teens compare to Teens in previous decades?

There's a definite increase in teen depression -- but it seems to be a recent phenomenon. Incidence of clinical depression raised from 5 to 10% between 2014 and 2020 in teens.

The pandemic is a major factor. So are, certainly, all of the other major crises.

Anecdotally I think all kinds of media these days -- social or otherwise -- seem to have a business model based on dread, vague anxiety and dissatisfaction. But maybe I'm just an old crank.

[hwhatting]

The job market itself now is positively terrible.

I don't know how is it where you live, but in Germany, for the last couple of years, companies have been searching desperately for workers and have, you won't believe it, even started to offer higher wages. And this is happens both at the top end of the wage spectrum - the company I work for is going out of its way to catch graduates fresh from university, and at the lower end; factories and the handicraft business can't fill their apprenticeships.

The housing market is virtually impossible for anybody younger than 40 to break into.

That part is true here as well and seems only to get worse.

A third point concerns the present period - it's not an original thought that happiness depends less on one's objective circumstances and more on how you compare to others and what perspectives you see for yourself. And also it's not an original idea that the prespective that one can do as well as or better than the previous generation in terms of living standards, which sustained previous generations, seems to have been lost.

It isn't an unoriginal thought, but it is a rather silly one. One can only be expected to rationalise away so many objections to the various problems one faces; expecting to do as well as the previous generation (broadly speaking) is a reasonable expectation, and if factors of policy are preventing it, it's more reasonable to fight that, and to spread the idea that it is wrong, rather than to simply grin and bear it, or to try to use magical thinking to make it seem all right.

I think you misunderstand me here. I'm not trying to rationalise anything away, I'm just saying that it doesn't help to look at living standards in the 50s or 60s and say "well, living standards were lower then, so don't complain, you're better off", but my point is eaxactly that people expect a prespective of living better, and that seems to be lost. So basically saying the same things as you, just underlining that this idea is neither original to me nor terribly new.

[MacAnDàil]

My younger sister is going to buy a flat so in Scotland it doesn't seem too difficult.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

The job market itself now is positively terrible.

I don't know how is it where you live, but in Germany, for the last couple of years, companies have been searching desperately for workers and have, you won't believe it, even started to offer higher wages. And this is happens both at the top end of the wage spectrum - the company I work for is going out of its way to catch graduates fresh from university, and at the lower end; factories and the handicraft business can't fill their apprenticeships.

To clarify location — central North Carolina, United States. Until recently, I lived in Charlotte, but hyperinflation hit at a time when I had to move, so I had to give up the job that had sort-of done what you describe (paid what would've been a decent wage pre-Covid). I suspect a collusion of forces — being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and living in a State with labour unions mostly restricted to Government jobs, the housing market already being awful — however even while in the biggest city in the area, I had trouble finding work that would pay me a living wage and not have some untenable string attached (being situated in a place I ended up being unable to afford to live was the last one, but before that my body failed to adapt to working nights). Now, among family, where life is less-expensive, I still have trouble finding any business (in spite of the alleged shortage) that seems to want to hire me. Apparently, from what research I have done, this is not rare, and businesses are actually quite slow about it. A lot of the vacant positions seem to also be things people have either retired out of, or at least to require skills that are not common, and that the businesses in question do not appear to want to have the "expense" of teaching.

If I understand right, how jobs work in the environments in which we exist is also fairly different. I should probably note that I think the jobs on offer are often pretty terrible in themselves, and are certainly a source of alienation among my now-non-teenaged cohort (I've just last month turned 34). This is only tangentially related to the original topic, but I have a very strong idea that many formerly-alienated teenagers are now alienated adults. I can't think of a thing I've done for money for which I think I was either adequately compensated for the sacrifice of part of my transient human existence, or that was of particularly noteworthy benefit to society. I don't have some grandiose desire to make big changes in the world, but I would like to know that any work I do is actually useful to somebody other than the already-wealthy shareholders of some large company, and is a part of needful production and not wasteful overproduction.

The standard full-time workweek is also still 40 hours here. A good chunk of time I have been at work in the past, I was doing my best to look busy even though there was little for me to do, but I needed the money to continue to exist (and I was not alone in this matter). Even with all the trouble surrounding it, I do prefer existence to non-existence.

Just continuing the musing, there is something very alienating, I think, in the large amount of work expected, especially when the work seems to be more than was expected in the past, for lower returns when adjusted for inflation. There is also some "usefulness dissonance" between the money-gaining "work" and the things I do that I think are actually worthwhile (and which seem to do the most good to the most people). I also notice people do not seem to like indolence much. When working retail, a lot of my coworkers were retirees who were bored without having anything to do all day. I do not think any idea of widespread "laziness" is at all valid. When I've had younger coworkers, they seemed more eager to prove themselves than they did eager to shirk.

The housing market is virtually impossible for anybody younger than 40 to break into.

That part is true here as well and seems only to get worse.

It seems fairly universal in "developed countries" at the moment. My best chance of owning property is far too morbid for me to want to think about it.

My younger sister is going to buy a flat so in Scotland it doesn't seem too difficult.

But there are exceptions, it seems.

A third point concerns the present period - it's not an original thought that happiness depends less on one's objective circumstances and more on how you compare to others and what perspectives you see for yourself. And also it's not an original idea that the prespective that one can do as well as or better than the previous generation in terms of living standards, which sustained previous generations, seems to have been lost.

It isn't an unoriginal thought, but it is a rather silly one. One can only be expected to rationalise away so many objections to the various problems one faces; expecting to do as well as the previous generation (broadly speaking) is a reasonable expectation, and if factors of policy are preventing it, it's more reasonable to fight that, and to spread the idea that it is wrong, rather than to simply grin and bear it, or to try to use magical thinking to make it seem all right.

I think you misunderstand me here. I'm not trying to rationalise anything away, I'm just saying that it doesn't help to look at living standards in the 50s or 60s and say "well, living standards were lower then, so don't complain, you're better off", but my point is eaxactly that people expect a prespective of living better, and that seems to be lost. So basically saying the same things as you, just underlining that this idea is neither original to me nor terribly new.

[/quote]
Yes, sorry, I do seem to have misunderstood you.

[Arzena]

On top of that, even exchanging letters gives you something physical to interact with; email and messages on social media do not unless you go as far as to print things out.

I'm curious why this should make a significant difference.

Imo a lot of people view digital existence as something uniquely separated from physical existence. Hence if they do not realize that both are part of the same unity, having a tangible message on a piece of paper becomes somehow more meaningful than a text message even if both contain the same content.