Young adults and mental health: Is more childhood independence the answer?
When reading an article like this I’m distracted by the overwhelming number of possible causes. Could be life today, life 10 years ago, or expectations for the future. We don’t have sufficient data to really disentangle so many possible variables. As a youngish adult myself I’m not sure my peers know what’s going on either as they experience mental health problems. Everything is shrouded in such complicated stories about azburgers, food intolerances (gut health), economic inequality, wholeness, pandemic, inflation, social media, consumerism, climate anxiety, etc.<p>It makes me wonder about more general solutions to the more general problems. I’m most persuaded by Adam Curtis’s documentaries that what we’re really experiencing is the failures of individualism being pushed too far.<p>The story is compelling. Life has always been hard, and the way humanity copes and intervenes is through social institutions ahd the grand stories that bring us together to collectively act and solve them. It’s family, local communities, churches, etc. that provide direct emotional and physical support at scale.<p>These institutions have messed up in the past, bringing with them a legacy of bad decisions and structured inequality, but I increasingly agree with Adam Curtis that deprioritising them in favor of radical individualism just isn’t working.<p>As Curtis says - we need a new grand story for what society is all about and social institutions to organise around that story.<p>And until then my peers and I will wander in the dark wondering why we feel so afraid, alone, and purposeless. We got rid of the leadership hierarchies we hated, and tech in particular helped us do it by creating markets for everything. You can live in your bubble with remote anything and delivery everything. But we failed to create a new reason for living. It’s all just open markets, infinite choice, and no need to depend on others or for them to depend on you.<p>Among other things, people want to feel like someone needs them.