Suicide is on the rise for young Americans, with no clear answers

This is fine🔥🐶☕🔥@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 124 points –
Suicide is on the rise for young Americans, with no clear answers
bbc.com
68

... No clear answers?

I'm 35. I make enough to pay bills but a home is still out of reach for me and my gf, together we pull about 175k

When I was 21, expensive drafts were $5/16oz. Cheap ones were $1. Rent was ~$750/mo, utils and stuff brought you close to $1000. I worked 40 hrs a week in a kitchen making $15/hr. I got free food the burritos there were $9.99, fair at the time.

Today, someone makes the same wage, gets 12 hrs a week, the food isn't free when you work there a burrito is $17.99, and the apt I was in is $1750/mo

I wanted to die plenty in my 20s. I can only imagine the bleak hellhole they see and exist in.

...the clear answer is more opportunity, more money, more education, less burdens.

What the fuck happened? Like it was bad for me and my friends. Our parents pitied us. But now a draft beer is line $11 for 10 oz. A cheap McDonald's order is $15.

It's clickbait. There was an article like this a while ago about teens and suicide and they were like, "we have no idea why this is happening!", even though for years people were saying social media was harming teens.

Social media is not the cause. There are so many problems that young people are helpless to do anything about. Congress's desire to restrict and censor internet access for minors has to be more impactful than social media itself.

I guess we should say that it's an "intensifier". If you get bullied at school, it no longer stays at school. If there's gossip or someone does something embarrassing it's no longer forgotten, but quickly plastered all over the Internet. I graduated high school in 2004, so I didn't have to deal with any of this.

even though for years people were saying social media was harming teens.

And that article, had you bother to read it, pointed out that there was plenty of conflicting evidence as to whether social media was the cause, and warned that by mindlessly blaming social media because it is easy might lead us to overlook the real culprit.

But good on you for demonstrating it's point.

This comment is clickbait if you think social media is only bad for teens

It definitely has negative effects for everyone, but teens/tweens are the most susceptible to it.

If $175k/year isn't enough for you, you are part of the problem.

So many people work harder for so much less, but you think you deserve more before them.

Just like how people richer than you operate.

Enough for what? They clearly stated that home ownership is out of reach for them.

Rest of their comparison is about things now vs things 10 years back and how it's worse for someone in their teens and 20s.

Learn to read.

Enough to stop you from complaining you don't have enough.

Their comparison is irrelevant.

You're just upset I'm criticizing people with too much wealth.

Is a home not under the constant annual threat of becoming unaffordable (I'm talking about renting, since you since seem to have reading comprehension difficulties) "too much" for someone to expect to achieve?

Jesus wept, if I earned HALF that I'd be very comfortable for the rest of my life. That's an insane income.

Imagine earning almost two hundred grand a year as a family and then suggesting it's a struggle. That's wild.

I mean sure, if you live in a gated wealthy community and only buy the finest things, and have very high wealthy standards, then I imagine that would seem like pocket change.

But 14,500 dollaroos a MONTH? That's enough to support multiple families. That's equivalent to SIX adults working a full time minimum wage job. SIX!

Imagine being two people, bringing in the wage of six people, and suggesting it's a tough life. I would kill to be in that highly privileged position haha.

I got like $60k a year as a programmer, and spun up my own company after a year of that. Like, how are you not able to save for a house / pay off a mortgage on 175k a year.

I struggled at $15 an hour living in a low cost area.

When rent is $2k a month, plus food and utilities, that money goes quiiiick

17 more...
18 more...

It can't be the soul crushing capitalism, commoditization of everything (love included), and isolation guys, right? It's definitely not our corporate profits.

Can't be added on with multiple "Once in a generation" natural disasters happening on a yearly basis with temp records breaking yearly, nations with the power to demolish the world rattling sabers over a fight that's been going before we were born, zero chance of moving upwards in the crushing capitalism, all the while the leadership is fighting over identity politics instead of acknowledging any of the problems. Surely none of those are add on factors.

I think it mostly comes down to increasingly unfair distribution of wealth, which leaves people with no hope to better their standards of living.

Our civilization creates things with constantly increasing productivity, which should lead to better pay and less time spent working, and more time to live a fulfilling life. Instead, all this added wealth is funneled towards a few mindbogglingly rich individuals.

This happens with the help of a sizable fraction of the population, which has become convinced that their mediocre situation is in fact caused by even poorer and more miserable people, rather than the assholes siphoning everything and everyone from the top of their already obscene piles of riches. And there's no sign of this changing anytime soon. No wonder people are desperate.

Our society benefits those who manipulate and cheat, and punishes those who choose not to. Pretty simple

only true for top percentiles.

Nope, it's full spectrum. An asshole cashier that manages to fudge their drawer so the next shift comes up short and they get the cash in their pocket is considered "clever" for pulling one over on the rube. Arbitrary division and competition has soaked through all levels of America.

p short and they get the cash in their pocket is considered “clever” for pulling one over on the rube.

lol. How does garbage like this get any upvotes? No one but other assholes and thieves would think this is clever. To everyone else they would be a theif.

The only reason there's no clear answer is because it's several answers all together.

It's the growing disparity in wealth.

I recommend taking matters into your own hands before taking your own lives.

It’s a lot of things. Climate hopelessness, a political system that seems hellbent on maintaining this negative feedback loop, yes, the economic situation, but also a soulless life under late stage capitalism where it’s proven over and over again you matter less than a line going up, we are commodified at every turn, our personality traits are nothing more than economic indicators or data points to sell us more shit…we live in a hostile world. And it’s hostile by humanity’s own making. And it’s soulless by our own making. Maybe humans used to die at 25 by a mountain lion attack more frequently, but some kind of purpose was found in that survival life. Depression and anxiety and a feeling of pointlessness are capitalism-made.

This problem seems so framed by experts as “why do these kids want to die?” When the question they should be asking is “what is society giving them to live for?”

I'm on a train trip across the U.S. today, so I will add what I see out the window: A landscape systematically strip-mined of beauty, meaning, and sense of place in service of extracting maximum profit from the people who have to exist in it.

Yup. That too.

We are detached from anything close to a life tied to meaning. All meaning was bought and sold. Our ancestors were turned into bricks to build the foundation of capitalism, and we aren’t even that important anymore. We’re the fuel that the massive engine of capitalism runs on. The machine is built. Now it’s running over capacity and more and more of us are needed to stoke the fires that keep the over-indulged engine running at max capacity to spit out some goddamn pitiful little line that means further excessive wealth for those who were born from the people who turned our ancestors into goddamn bricks.

And they ask, “why are kids so darn melancholy?!”

Please point to the bootstraps I may pull to fix:

Income disparity

Inflation

Price Fixing

Expensive Medical Care

Rising rents

Increasing Fuel Costs

College Debt

Climate Crisis

Subsidized Oil,Gas,Corn,Beef,Eggs

Water Rights Crises

Because if they exist I will pull them.

Mutual aid. It has a real shot at working because it crucially isn't about pulling yourself up, but people getting together to lift one another up.

And longer term, a lot of mutual aid organisations have explicitly revolutionary goals.

Agreed. A lot of these problems are generational and stem from a twisted view of individualism. The "I got mine" mentality.

My reply was more about the ambiguity of "take matters into your own hands." I cannot solve this with my own hands. I need help. Mutual aid networks provide that.

Do you have any particular examples you like?

Food not bombs is a decent name, although it's decentralised so every org will be different. If you search "food not bombs" + your city or state you're likely to find something. All these orgs are local and decentralised because it's a primarily anarchist method, but once you get in contact with one group they can point you towards others.

We're being robbed of stability, autonomy, and sleep. Economical demands are above our physical capability. Also the legal system is predatory. What's to live for?

Music is cool for the limited time I have where my ears belong to me. Maybe when I can afford furniture I'll be able to relax between shifts.

I'm saying all this even when I practically hit the jackpot with rent cost and work for a pretty decent company. I'll be ok but the rest of my life before this has just been a demonstration that life outside my control isn't worth anything.

Maybe because the world has become fucking shit? I could list dozens of answers and all of them combined are a clear answer.