What about kids who didn’t have a yard where they could play? Those whose parents lost their jobs? Those that have been evicted because their parents could not pay ever increasing rents?
Besides, living in an economy that moves from recession to recession has an impact on the mental health of their parents, especially in economies with little or non-existent safety nets (see UK and US), and I’d be very surprised if that didn’t have repercussions on their kids’ mental health.
I don't disagree at all with you pointing out the plight of families and children less privileged than OP (where I am, there is now a steady stream of truly awful stories about what happened to young children during lockdown when the monitoring and intervention of society as a whole, and social services in particular, is suddenly and completely removed).
>economies with little or non-existent safety nets (see UK and US)
However, as a resident of the UK, I have to ask - how does it have a non-existent safety net?
> However, as a resident of the UK, I have to ask - how does it have a non-existent safety net?
Jobseeker’s Allowance is one forth of the average rent in London and I’m not sure you are entitled to it if you have any savings.
If you lose your private insurance you’d have to rely on the NHS, which is not as bad as what happens in the US, but it’s not in the same league of the French, German or even the Italian healthcare systems.
>Jobseeker’s Allowance is one forth of the average rent in London
Tricky issue. I do know that where I live (Wales), there are huge numbers of people living relatively comfortably on a benefit-funded lifestyle.
There's also a whole lot more to the UK safety net than Jobseeker's Allowance.
>If you lose your private insurance you’d have to rely on the NHS
If you don't mind me asking, are you a UK native? That's a fantastic turnaround of the typical sentiment about the NHS, which is that it's a shining example of what the wonders of socialised care can do, and how we can do without the evils of privatised healthcare. FWIW I agree with you - it's actually a stinking dump of a money pit, and an embarrassment to anyone who has experienced any other 1st world health care.
> There's also a whole lot more to the UK safety net than Jobseeker's Allowance.
Fine, but given what I pay in income tax and NI (~80K£ last year), I’d expect a lot more than 4-500£ per month plus (maybe?) 500£ of housing benefit and access to a food bank. I would expect at least 2–3-4 times that for at least one or two years, no questions asked. I understand this money may be enough to live in Wales, but I can’t be expected to relocate there because I lost my job.
> If you don't mind me asking, are you a UK native?
No, I’m not. Hence I’m immune to the NHS cult. :)
Unfortunately several members of my family have battle tested the Italian and the German healthcare systems. Half of them would have died horribly in the UK.
Not necessarily, in Germany you get a higher unemployment benefit if you used to earn more (because you paid more taxes and contributions). If I remember correctly, you get 60-70% of your salary capped at ~2-3K€ per month (plus some money for the kids and pension contributions), which is enough to live comfortably everywhere in the country.
If I lost my job in London, I’d fall instantly into a form of poverty that doesn’t exist anywhere else in Europe, notwithstanding the exorbitant amount of taxes I pay every year. Yes, you get some pocket money, that’s why I said the safety net is almost non-existent and not totally non-existent.
Well, here we've just picked a different set of winners and losers. Can you imagine the outcry if here we changed our benefits system to something like that Germany? "I've been out of work for years, and now this schmuck gets 40k a year for free?"
Again FWIW, I prefer something like that.
Then again, it seems you are aware of the rules of the game you are playing.
Whatever, but the result is that in London you don’t have a safety net. You lose your job, you get a section 21 notice the day after you miss a rent payment and you are in the streets with a child to feed.
> What about kids who didn’t have a yard where they could play?
> Those whose parents lost their jobs?
If you acknowledge that, you should also acknowledge that heir only window to the outside World was a screen where some a*hole from Dubai whose only purpose was selling themselves and the things they were dressing to their "followers" for money, was saying all day that "we're gonna be fine" and then we didn't, "we are gonna come out better" and then we didn't and they interiorized the idea that they will never make it, because they missed the train, they are only teenagers but social networks taught them that you go big or go home at the age of 13.
No matter how much support they get from families, their validation nowadays comes from social networks, their peers and who their peers follow or what trend is popular ATM.
Compare that to my father born in 1941, in fascist Italy, his father lost in the Russian campaign, his house occupied by nazi, met his father at the age of 6 and lost him soon after for an undiagnosed infection, lived through 3 World pandemics, in 1957 during the Asian flu lost his sister aged 18, started working at the age of 6, lived through political turmoil of the 60s (my father was a socialist), terrorism of the 70s, oil crisis in 1973, heroin epidemic of the 80s, AIDS pandemic (he worked in an hospital), war on former Yugoslavia in the 90s, two Gulf wars etc. etc.
What saved him?
He could only look at himself and his own life, if it somewhat improved he could notice, if it somewhat got worse, he could hope things could change for the better, as they did so many times before.
Imagine putting him in front of IG and what could have happened.
> He could only look at himself and his own life, if it somewhat improved he could notice, if it somewhat got worse, he could hope things could change for the better, as they did so many times before.
Yes, but not only that. He also saw that he was better off than his parents and that throughout the years his life improved significantly, while a 30-year-old today is worse off than their parents and, rightly or not, feels that life is getting worse every year.
My salary quadrupled in the last 6 years, I managed to buy a flat and I can afford to pay for my child’s education, but to achieve all of this I have to be way better than my average colleague, way luckier and to work in one of the highest paying industries. All of this to achieve what a brute working in a post office in the 80s would have taken for granted (buy a house, send your kid to school and nursery, save some money, buy a car). This leaves me in a constant state of mild anxiety (what if I stop being good at my job? What if I become sick and I can’t provide for my family? What will be of my child in such a toxic environment?) and the only social network I use is Twitter, where I only follow reputable newspapers (practically I use it as an RSS feed). I understand that my views may be influenced by living in the UK, which is a more anxiogenic society than the rest of Europe.
> while a 30-year-old today is worse off than their parents and, rightly or not, feels that life is getting worse every year.
my question is: are they actually?
because if we factor in what it meant to live when their parents lived, are they really worse?
I'm not particularly richer monetary wise than my parents were at my age, but I earn a lot more money than they did, that I spend in a lot of things that didn't even exist back then.
My parents have never been on a flight before they were 65.
Also, my parents had some State benefit for being health care workers, but hey were working shifts of 5 consecutive days / 12 hours a shift, with two children at home.
That's not how medical profession works anymore, shifts are 8 hours maximum in 24 hours and workers have to rest at least 12 hours before going to work again. That means a night shift every 2 days maximum.
> What if I become sick and I can’t provide for my family? What will be of my child in such a toxic environment?
That's the same environment your kids are living in though, I'd say that passing onto them the idea that you have to provide for your family or you literally risk to die at such young age is the most profound damage social networks have produced to younger generations.
In my country that would not happen, health care is provided for everybody, especially those who can't afford it, but younger generations that grew up on social networks feels that they are in your same situation: if they don't succeed in life they'll be screwed forever.
But since we leave in the post-truth neo-speak era, they also believe that there are opportunities to become rich everywhere, and the only way to *not* become rich is to get a job. Job is for losers with no talent, passion, vision and/or self respect.
Of course it's not their fault, it's what the modern pied pipers (the so called influencer) are teaching them, unfiltered, there's literally no way to shield them from that crap.
Yes, they are. At least in the UK, an average salary is often not enough to rent an ex-council flat, a place where the poor used to reside. To afford a flat comparable to the one where I used to live as a child (that we could afford with the salary of a primary school teacher), I’d have to earn 6 times the average salary.
Yes, I can take flights, which if you are a frequent flyer take 5% of your life. But for a large majority of people my age, the rest of their life is spent in an accommodation that is more expensive and objectively worse than the one their parents could afford.
> Yes, they are. At least in the UK, an average salary is often not enough to rent an ex-council flat, a place where the poor used to reside.
IMO that means that people have more money, or the prices wouldn't go up in places once reserved to the poor.
Also, IMO, data says that salaries are going up, not down. I think much of the effect is due minimum wages and the fact that prices of accommodation got more expensive is because market knows people are earning at least a certain amount of money.
Also, houses of 2022 are very different from houses of the 50s.
You wouldn't put your worst enemy to live where poor people lived no more than 50 years ago.
So we spend more on housing because the life style "I work 16 hours a day and come home only to sleep" has radically changed into "I spent a lot of my time at home, even for leisure" (streaming, gaming, etc.)
The new figures, revealed by the LibDems, showed that in 1950, the average full-time weekly wage was worth £7.08 (equivalent to £499 in today's money) while the basic weekly state pension was £1.36 (£91.65). Last year the average wage had climbed to £549.80, but the pension was just £87.30
> But for a large majority of people my age, the rest of their life is spent in an accommodation that is more expensive and objectively worse than the one their parents could afford.
My parents bought a house paying 19% of interest rates.
> IMO that means that people have more money, or the prices wouldn't go up in places once reserved to the poor.
Whatever, on an average salary you can’t afford to live in a council flat that 30 years ago was meant for the poor. It means that you are poorer.
> Also, IMO, data says that salaries are going up, not down. I think much of the effect is due minimum wages and the fact that prices of accommodation got more expensive is because market knows people are earning at least a certain amount of money.
Data says that real salaries in the UK are still below 2007.
> Also, houses of 2022 are very different from houses of the 50s.
You wouldn't put your worst enemy to live where poor people lived no more than 50 years ago.
Council flats haven’t been replaced by luxury apartments, they are the same shitholes they were 40 years ago, but now you can’t afford to live in there with an average salary.
> So we spend more on housing because the life style "I work 16 hours a day and come home only to sleep" has radically changed into "I spent a lot of my time at home, even for leisure" (streaming, gaming, etc.)
We spend more on housing because we stopped building houses and prices went up. One doesn’t spend an entire salary on rent because they like Netflix.
> My parents bought a house paying 19% of interest rates.
> I'm paying less than 1%
I’d gladly pay 19% interest if my flat cost a third and inflation was 15%.
I am sorry but the idea that 'bad old days had great mental health is a meme.
Do we have any evidence? Was anyone even counting who is depressed and who isn't? What about other mental issues and traumas? They didnt exactly have loads of psycologists avaliable.
Did you not read what I wrote or are you trying to troll?
Anyway, I'll rephrase it, so that it may become clearer to you: my father didn't survive all his traumas because he's stronger than current generations, but because he was not constantly surrounded by misleading messages of rapid success and luxurious lifestyle, something that you should absolutely try to obtain or you're a loser, he was too busy trying to get out the horrors of a war and start his life.
In a way being detached from what's happening in the rest of the World, except the usual news reporting and the usual political propaganda, sheltered him from the fear of failure.
My father started being a bit depressed when he retired, because he felt he had no purpose anymore.
Kids today feel they have no purpose too soon in their lives.
> Do we have any evidence? Was anyone even counting who is depressed and who isn't?
Yeah, we do have them.
Just look for them.
I was volunteering with Red Cross when Rwandan genocide happened, I helped kids with parts of the skull cut out with a machete, they were not depressed, they were scared and traumatized, but not depressed. They were actually happy to be alive and have other kids to play with in a new country, with the perspective of a new life.
Same happened after the first war in Yugoslavia.
> What about other mental issues and traumas?
trauma doesn't automatically lead to depression.
Kids of today are not traumatized, they are pressured into success by the world surrounding them, which is almost entirely social networks.
> They didnt exactly have loads of psycologists avaliable.
In my country psychologic support is free and universal since after the WW2.
And even before then, but you know, Mussolini was in power, so it didn't really matter.
Basaglia, the great reformer of our psychiatric system, was born in 1924.
Psychology was born in 19th century, Jung was already practicing in 1900, if only there weren't two World wars in 30 years...
As an aside, watering down what constitutes trauma and then assuming everyone's actions are the result of trauma seems like a path toward denying people their agency which is an implied goal of a lot of people these days.
> You have to keep in ming that there is huge stigma around going to a psycologust for help, esp. for people of older generation.
that stigma still exists.
the difference is that if it is necessary (for example psychiatric disorders) in my country they will treat you for free, even if it takes years or have to take drugs for your entire life.
Besides, living in an economy that moves from recession to recession has an impact on the mental health of their parents, especially in economies with little or non-existent safety nets (see UK and US), and I’d be very surprised if that didn’t have repercussions on their kids’ mental health.