Famine (often with Drought)? What do you think the alleged "Let them eat cake" came from? The nobility and the bourgeoisie weren't affected, only the peasants.
Plague? The motto was cito, longe, tarde: quickly travel far away from the city, and return late. Guess who had that option to leave the plague-affected town for their country estate?
War? While not as clear as the others, it's similar: besides a few sons of nobility, it was the peasants that did the dying, not everybody.
When is the last famine that saw millions dead in the USA while the rich lived lavishly? Because that's what the past looked like, so "winner takes all" was obviously much more true back then. Society used to be much, much more unequal, capitalism was much harsher.
I might be mistaken, but judging that you're on HN and likely work in tech/STEM and had the money to pay for years of therapy for your daughter, I assume you're part of what would previously be called the bourgeoisie -- so there's really no factual reason for you or your daughter to be worried about an increasingly unequal wealth distribution, because you'll have more than your "fair share". I'm not judging, and I don't want to say that her pain isn't or wasn't real, but maybe it's not a rational response to the state of the world and her role in it.
If you look to Western Europe, we have similar issues, yet "winner takes all" couldn't be further from the truth here, we have strong welfare states, we have high taxes, yet teens are still struggling, apparently more than usual. We have very few school shootings, we're lifting any restrictions on abortions, we're constantly making it easier for trans people to transition etc etc etc, so lots of things are fundamentally different. Yet we still see something very similar, and we do have cellphones and social media.
Maybe you should actually listen to the kids. After months of group therapy I can attest to they're telling us. We're just not listening. Continuing to blame social media is all the confirmation they need to know we're not listening.
Oh, and the active shooter drills they've been doing at school now for the past 10 years isn't helping anything. Now they worry about going to school and getting shot. Thanks to Uvalde they now know that the police who are supposed to keep them safe in an active shooter situation will just leave their asses flapping in the breeze getting shot it.
But hey, let's blame social media. Better yet, let's blame TikTok. We don't like them being Chinese-owned anyway.
I repeat myself: we have a similar outcome in Europe, but we have a wildly different situation, and the things you listed don't apply here (and many of them applied in the US even stronger in the past when the kids were alright).
Group therapy is for helping people deal with something. It's not a process to understand a phenomenon, that's not its goal.
> But hey, let's blame social media. Better yet, let's blame TikTok. We don't like them being Chinese-owned anyway.
You're mixing things up. Calm your emotions, I'm not attacking you, and I'm not attacking your daughter.
> Group therapy is for helping people deal with something. It's not a process to understand a phenomenon, that's not its goal.
Yes, and I have ears - and use them. I listened to what the kids were saying. I listen to the kids I work with in the youth organizations in which I'm involved. I listen to the kids on the teams I coach. If you haven't figured it out, I'm around a lot of kids.
You wanna know something none of these kids have ever complained about (and boy do they complain a lot!) - social media making them feel bad. I don't know a single kid that was like I may as well quit since I can't do X as good as some social media darling.
I can tell you what they do complain about, and I wrote about that elsewhere on this thread.
But I do know politicians love blaming social media so they can use it as fuel for their TikTok ban. They can use it as fuel to reign in "Big Tech."
Being a Gen X'er I can tell you in the 80's and 90's it was video games and heavy metal music they were blaming for the kids' woes. Today it's social media. All I can say is they were wrong then, and they're wrong now.
> Being a Gen X’er I can tell you in the 80’s and 90’s it was video games and heavy metal music they were blaming for the kids’ woes.
Yeah, 80’s heavy metal music (and D&D, though politically that was more at the local level, though like heavy metal it tied in with the Satanic Panic), 90’s video games and rap music (though obviously there was no clear cut over, just a gradual shift of focus.)
And the arguments were pretty much the same as with social media, including a whole lot of post hoc ergo propter hoc without good evidence of causation and where there were alternative and stronger causal explanations.
Famine (often with Drought)? What do you think the alleged "Let them eat cake" came from? The nobility and the bourgeoisie weren't affected, only the peasants.
Plague? The motto was cito, longe, tarde: quickly travel far away from the city, and return late. Guess who had that option to leave the plague-affected town for their country estate?
War? While not as clear as the others, it's similar: besides a few sons of nobility, it was the peasants that did the dying, not everybody.
When is the last famine that saw millions dead in the USA while the rich lived lavishly? Because that's what the past looked like, so "winner takes all" was obviously much more true back then. Society used to be much, much more unequal, capitalism was much harsher.
I might be mistaken, but judging that you're on HN and likely work in tech/STEM and had the money to pay for years of therapy for your daughter, I assume you're part of what would previously be called the bourgeoisie -- so there's really no factual reason for you or your daughter to be worried about an increasingly unequal wealth distribution, because you'll have more than your "fair share". I'm not judging, and I don't want to say that her pain isn't or wasn't real, but maybe it's not a rational response to the state of the world and her role in it.
If you look to Western Europe, we have similar issues, yet "winner takes all" couldn't be further from the truth here, we have strong welfare states, we have high taxes, yet teens are still struggling, apparently more than usual. We have very few school shootings, we're lifting any restrictions on abortions, we're constantly making it easier for trans people to transition etc etc etc, so lots of things are fundamentally different. Yet we still see something very similar, and we do have cellphones and social media.