Comment on Childhood disrupted: is the internet damaging young people’s development?
c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 9 months agoI wonder if it has anything to do with needing to be a millionaire to support a family and the earning potential being locked away under skyrocketing costs of education.
When people have no hope for a future and start realizing that their ability to succeed is being placed behind wealth tests, they give up. When an entire generation gives up you see it in the population decline. Most people don’t want to start a family knowing they can’t afford it, so they just refuse to. They’d rather just sit around and do as little as possible since doing as much as possible will not reward them.
This situation has been in the making since at least the 1970-80’s but people have been preaching about self correcting markets and nonsense like trickle down economics to cover for the inevitable collapse due to an entire generation+ realizing they’re totally fucked with no hope of it getting better outside of a full political overhaul that won’t happen.
laverabe@lemmy.world 9 months ago
This is going to sound like a tangent, but I think car centricity holds a lot of blame for many societal issues.
150 years ago you would just walk wherever you needed to go 99% of the time. Now we drive 99% of the time. Most people don’t have a strong community/village physically in the real world. This lack of interpersonal interaction leads to lack of empathy to some degree among society.
Lack of empathy makes it all about me and not society. That at least marginally contributes to income inequality among other issues.
We can improve society on a national, state and local level by advocating for pedestrian improvements. I would argue walkability of cities is one of the greatest issues of the 21st century, and historians will hopefully classify this century as one in which we realized our past errors and took steps to correct them.