this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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collapse of the old society
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Maybe a shocker to you, but you're not a young adult anymore.
This study is specifically about people in their 20s. Usually in that age you're supposed to be happy and full of hope for the future. Sure, your time maybe sucked, but you're not the average.
Today's youth grows increasingly frustrated and hopeless, because if you look around, there's nothing to hope for. The future is bleak. That wasn't the case 20 years ago.
"Maybe a shocker to you, but you’re not a young adult anymore." That's what they're talking about. They're more happy now in their 40s than they were as a young adult.
...and the study says that youths today are less happy than before. Those are two different things. That's really not that hard.
I don't think they were trying to illustrate the study, just telling us their personal experience, which goes against the study results. Outlying experiences are interesting in my point of view.
No, it doesn't, if the point of the study and the experience here have no relation.
The study compares the happiness of youth over time. Nothing more. Whether some bloke had a bad youth and a great adulthood has absolutely zero relation to that.
In fact, I would argue that this complete blindness for the actual problems the youth faces today, is the reason why they are so miserable.
You're basically on a similar path like the "just walk into the office and greet the manager with a firm handshake, then you'll get a job" folks. You overemphasize past experiences because you don't want to or are unable to understand that the world you grew up in is gone.
There is value in statistics, because it tells you about the ways the world works in general, the tendencies and relevant trends. There is value in casuistics, because it tells you about the diversity, the different and even rare phenomena that would be filtered out by statistics, but it's good to know they exist.
The article is a statistic. What's been uttered here is just a bunch of anecdotes.
Yes, that's what I'm talking about. I value the article for it's universal statistical results. I also appreciate the individual anecdotal experiences posted in the discussion. I understand the difference and meaning of statistics and anecdotal data, so I can enjoy both without being confused about it.
I was worried about climate 20 years ago, when I was a young adult. I essentially Cassandra’d large parts of today’s world (growing fascism, worse access to quality of life, healthcare etc, bad job opportunities, enormous youth unemployment, massive environmental damage).
I was for the record also miserable, and it surprises me to hear that everybody else wasn’t. Now I actually feel even worse about that period of my life.