Youthfully Sad
In a survey of 8000 high-school students between 2009 and 2021, the American CDC found the share of students with ‘persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness’ to have risen from 26 to 44%.
This is confirmed by objective measures, such as self-harm, eating disorders, and suicide.
Also, it’s not only happening in the US, but in most ‘developed countries.’ This is a global issue.
I was a sad kid between 11 and +/- 14 years of age.
During these three years, I could hardly cope with what I saw as the in-humanity of many adults ― mainly in the way they treated other kids. I’ve always been an idealist.
Then I found books about non-conscious processing. These may have saved my life, at least my being alive.
Why is youth so increasingly sad?
Several causes have been put forward: stressful news, social media, diminishing sociality, intensive modern parenting, COVID.
These are consistent with straightforward ideas about causality.
However:
- Why is stressful news so stressful?
- Why does youth abuse social media? Even more, why do social media abuse social media?
- Why is there diminishment in sociality?
- Why do parents replace quality with quantity?
- Why did nobody have the guts to take COVID as a crucial chance to forward depth?
Why is youth so sad? – Take two.
This needs in-depth answers to the above questions. These answers are much less straightforward.
The whole thing may be profoundly related to the meaning crisis.
New people (youngsters), coming of age into this world, need to make some sense of it. This sense cannot be freely given to them ― as can, for instance, a new toy, a new hobby, or even a new car.
Meaningfulness needs to grow. It can only come from inside. It grows together with the meaning-giver. Yet, if there is no meaning, there is nothing to live for ― thus, no joie de vivre. There may be pleasure (of the temporary kind), but no happiness, no fulfilling joyfulness.
Thus, there is only sadness, open or hidden.
This kind of sadness may turn into (open or hidden) depression or it may be one from the start. Indeed, we see that many (most?) cases of depression start from a young age.
What saved me at a fairly young age may be what is needed to diminish the global youthful sadness. This is a view of the human being that takes into account the whole person.
Now you know why AURELIS is so full of it. All youngsters need support in this, too.
Otherwise, the sadness of youth will be the sadness of the future.
Young people have two options:
- Make one’s heart into a less depth-sensitive thing.
- Go for it, trying to change the broad environment rather than be changed.
I have chosen the second option ― still curious where it will lead to.
Related Posts
Filling Void with Noise
In today’s world, it’s hard to escape the loud and unstoppable noise on screens, in minds, conversations, and culture itself. We’re surrounded by a ricochet of short-span stimulation — reactions, performances, and certainties. Beneath it all, one question whispers: What are we trying not to hear? The answer, quietly persistent, is this: a void ― Read the full article…
About Confabulation
Depending on how exact you want inferences to be, humans are born confabulators. Not surprisingly, we also see much confabulation in present-day generative pre-trained transformers (GPT). Confabulation is a look-alike but inexact information. Note that in the GPT field, this is nowadays called hallucination. Confabulation is inherent to mental ‘parallel distributed processing’ (PDP). Humans and Read the full article…
Our Memory is Our Thinking
Researchers used to think that human memory was an altogether different function from thinking, deciding, problem solving, etc. Not anymore. —Additionally, memory is also actively related to the act of perceiving. There are many functionally different brain parts, but they continually act together toward final results. The computer analogy From the start, digital computer guys Read the full article…