I recognize all the various societal and structural factors that disadvantage younger people. At the same time, people have agency. When I was in my early twenties (twenty years ago) my job was software development and my primary hobby was…software development. I was constantly improving my craft, primarily just because I loved it. Many of the people I worked with were the same.
It is, of course, not entirely fair to criticize younger people given that there are teams of psychologists working to make these products as addictive as possible. So perhaps we older people need to do something about it. Yes, I sound old AF: “kids, get off your phones and do something useful!” Yes, I say this to my own kids, with little discernible efficacy. But I honestly wonder what you all think of this. Do I have a point or is this just victim blaming?
The “screen” effect doesn’t exist. But the percentage of students enrolled in cs programs grew a lot of the last few years, and I’ve seen the passion difference have an effect. Two friends of mine graduated last year. Both had zero offers out of undergrad (this is the norm right now, again, completely irrelevant to screen time). One of them was passionate about coding and kept working on side projects/leetcoding, eventually landing a role at a tech company after a year of working at a boba shop. The other, who struggled with coding and was verbally not passionate about it (complained about it a lot, didn’t interview prep much) ended up throwing in the towel a few months on the job hunt.
An anecdote, but probably generalizable across those in today’s job market. But the market is the core problem, second to the individual’s willingness to grind. Neither are related to screen time.
This times a thousand. I wouldn't have the jobs I do today if I didn't spend probably on balance an unhealthy amount of time in front of my own screens in the 90's. I got into programming because I loved screens and wanted to make them show me different things.
The difference today is two-fold IMO:
* The job market, as stated, is shit, especially for tech right now. For decades kiddos have been propagandized into going into a future in comp science of varying depths and qualities, both here in the US, and overseas. We have more tech workers than ever, wages are falling because of over-supply, and too many are focused on niche framework technologies who's skills don't translate well across the wide breadth of what's actually used in industry. Example: my company is hiring right now and it's DIRE to try and find mobile developers who actually develop in Kotlin/Java/Swift/Objective-C. I'm drowning in resumes for React developers but we don't use any of that and have no desire to.
* The screens now used by would-be budding hackers are locked down to hell and back, and were put in their hands when they were likely still shitting in their pants (no judgement of course, we all did it for awhile) and they don't conceive of them as "machines I could play with" but instead, simply as a never ending font of distraction and entertainment, perfectly curated to their individual desires.
Now, if you're spending three hours a day writing your blog and promoting your reputation as a skilled developer that's possibly going to help you. If you spend it surfing TikTok that's almost certainly going to do nothing for you. Though back in my 20s I could waste hours just watching stupid shit on TV.
It's possibly harder now to get a great job offer right out of school, but getting a lot of rejections as a new graduate isn't new either. It used to be a thing for seniors near graduation to paper their living room or hallway with all their rejection letters.
Most people are average. They will end up with average jobs and earning average money. One negative thing about social media is that it makes the top overachievers seem normal, and when you compare their lives (at least as they portray them) to your own it can make you feel hopeless.
You spend more energy than ever making less money than ever and probably under more stress than ever over all the looming costs. That's not a state of mind where you just sit down at the end of the day and start working on your side project. Anyone who can do that is extraordinary, but I hope that isn't how we expect our future generations to operate.
Although I'm roughly half the age of the median HN user, and don't have a lot of life experience, one thing I've learned over the last few years - particularly during covid - is that people will accomplish success after a difficult circumstance, and will come out one of two ways (which often decides their core values, political leaning, empathy towards people in other difficult situations, etc.):
1. "I got through it, so anyone else can, too"; or
2. "I got through it, and believe no one else should need to".
I would bond with them through this shared hobby, make acquaintances, even friends, people who you could recognise even if it was just a nickname.
My first real software development job was through friends I met on IRC and forums, they knew me for years, and offered me an internship after we had worked on a hobby project for a Ultima Online game server.
Fast-forward to now, it is really hard for young people to find shared spaces with a sense of community, in the real world or online. Everything they experience online is through mass platforms where everyone is basically anonymous even though it became much more common to share your real name. How can you bond with someone in the comments section of a YouTube video about your hobby? Or in the comments of some TikTok/Instagram post that was quite interesting? You simply can't, that post or video will disappear from others' feeds, there's no sense of permanence of the members of a community.
I think the closest to this experience might be some Discord servers, it's one of the ways I found to try to meet people on my current hobbies but the experience is still very different than the tight-knitted groups of IRC channels from the past. Forums, for the most part, were eaten by reddit, for some hobbies there are still quite a few active ones but the discoverability is much worse, you will have to jump through some hoops (usually starting on a subreddit) to find one of those.
My feeling is just that community in general is in decline, I'm lucky to have managed to keep finding these bubbles and sticking with them, online or in the real world, but when I talk to my colleagues in the 20-24 age bracket I sense they simply don't have communities. They have a few friends who they might meet for a shared activity but they generally don't know a place where they can go and meet other similarly-minded folks.
The screens end up as a bad refuge to try to find these connections that were much more natural when we were young.
And sadly even this diminished engagement you are talking about is somewhat optimistic in that it assumes the people they are interacting with on mass platforms are even real people, which is increasingly not the case.
To put context on your 'Gen Z' assertion, as of Q3 2023, the average global screen time is approximately 6 hours and 40 minutes per day for users aged 16 to 64 - with most of that wholly attributable is due to a shift in the consumption from legacy to digital media, rather than an across the board increase in consumption.
The percentage of 12th graders who read a book or a magazine every day declined from 60% in the late 1970s to 16% by 2016, and 8th graders spent almost an hour less time watching TV in 2016 compared with the early 1990s. Trends were fairly uniform across gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.
https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/ppm-ppm0000203.pd...
In the grand scheme of things, the Victorian invention of 'childhood' has been effectively pushed up to about 21-25 in most of the Western World as a consequence of ladder-pulling and the increasing training necessary for the Information Economy. It's a societal rather than a generational thing reinforced from multiple angles.
Conversely, its the digital natives keeping boomer companies alive in the *aaS era. The hardships younger people face economically are almost entirely due to the collapse of any semblance of trade unionism or collective bargaining in the information and tech economies, combined with a cost of living crisis predicated on predatory housing policies.
Blaming screen-time is just a digital avocado-toast argument; trivialising the fact that this is the first set of generations to arguably have it worse off than their parents from an equality of outcome perspective, and attributing it to a problem of digital self-indulgence on the part of the youth.
Screens have had an impact in that they make entertainment more available and accessible on a moment's notice, and types of screen activity do, I believe, impact attention spans. That said, prior to television, humanity was still pretty good at finding ways to escape or entertain themselves, particularly in hard times.
A little bit of column A, a little bit of column B
so the nihilism is real and warranted, if they don't inherit at least a downpayment for a house from you while you are still alive, the jobs available - even for highly pedigreed people - don't provide the income for the downpayment, for the most part. they would need arbitrage with high paying work in a very low cost of living place, for a long time, or the same but coupled with a socioeconomic equal who also doesn't want any gaps in their high income employment.
many new-money parents want their children to prove... something... related to income and autonomy, which puts inheritance while living into "entitled handout" territory, instead of practical. while due to lifespan, any inheritance will only reach the child when the child is 60+ years old, where its impact to the utility and direction of their life is nullified, and it's just bean counting for the mere concept of "keeping money in the family" but doesn't give anyone a leg up in social status, partner selection, even where you own children's children go to school.
(note: if you actually are not confident in your retirement income and end of life care costs, then you are not parent this applies to. for parents sitting on big wins in real estate and other capital, it does.)
but the financial reality doesn't really support this slower moving culture. the share of people in the US that are both homeowners and married by age 30 has fallen to nearly single digits percents. Aside from marriage being less attractive too, many delay everything related due to being preoccupied with meager work and financial instability.
now that being said, the thing you are more familiar with, hustle, does still work. pumping earnings into an investment property somewhere less expensive does still work, only suboptimal because they would still need to be paying rent in the higher cost of living area. what's different is that burnout is just not valued any more. hustle culture itself is not valued, its nothing to brag about and a silent path one might pursue. while experiences are valued. entire generations of people watched gen-x and boomers delay gratification and saw their bodies fail by the time they reached the finish line. its seen as a cautionary tale, not discipline.
so yes, lots of people overcorrect into a defeatist attitude, but the incentives support it. normal jobs won't get them anywhere, high paying jobs also won't get them anywhere, the training for high paying jobs doesn't guarantee a high paying job either.
That said, what I see in young people around me (because of my age, there’s quite a few) is a lot of addiction, not nihilism. These are kids with opportunities based on their socioeconomic status and yet many are just wasting huge amounts of time. The underlying question behind my post is essentially, does Cal Newport’s theory of success - so good they can’t ignore you - hold? And what happens to society when a generation is sucked into what they themselves literally refer to as “brain rot”?
I think we both conclude that its not a conscious choice, screens are addictive.
I also think many people levying this scrutiny are just as addicted.
I took a community college class a few years back and for the first few sessions I was fidgeting, until I course corrected because I knew that was abnormal for me from the last time I was in formal education. My ability to course correct made me think about how younger generations may be at a disadvantage because they don't know any other way to operate.
> The underlying question behind my post is essentially, does Cal Newport’s theory of success - so good they can’t ignore you - hold? And what happens to society when a generation is sucked into what they themselves literally refer to as “brain rot”?
I think it holds, income and work look different to many people. A steady high paying job is still optimal for a broad population, but being influential on social media or making a roblox game, all of which is built in the ecosystem they spend time on, seems practical too.
Sure. But that bar is sky high now because it's very easy to ignore you otherwise. If you're not already running a successful company, releasing some viral piece of media, or publishing some novel research, you're going to be ignored. Having a 4.0 GPA with multiple interesting side projects and even an internship isn't necessarily getting you a job out of college anymore. Or at least, for now. Things you need to do to be noticed basically mean you already have means to somewhat sustain yourself.
I think you want it to be screen time because seeing people with high screen time affects you emotionally, and you subconsciously want it to be something that simple - and potentially something that can be changed through choice so some blame can be placed on the victims. Such a thing is attractive to a certain type of mind. That’s why I said you were holding a hammer looking for nails, you’re holding a screen time hammer and that’s not the way you should approach this if you want the scientific truth.
Good luck out there.
> is this just victim blaming?
seems like you answered your own question
So... you spent a lot of time in front of a screen, huh?
