hckrnws

I fell into the 20-24 age and was deeply suicidal last year. There were two main factors at the time, aside from my usual depression

1) horrendous and soul-crushing job market that constantly signaled to me that I had no value

2) incredibly skewed expectations of success due to the internet

I’ve moved past it for now, luckily, but I’m seeing a lot of people struggle, particularly men, and get left behind, with virtually nobody trying to make us feel valued or supported on the societal level. Many men, especially those without prospects for getting married/having kids, really don’t have a good reason to go on except pure hedonism. And that can only go so far.

> Many men, especially those without prospects for getting married/having kids, really don’t have a good reason to go on except pure hedonism. And that can only go so far.

FWIW, the missing element in this framing is real, substantive community. Not conversational or ephemeral community like you find online, but the kind of substantive community that engenders a network of mutual support.

It's not the only way through life, but people naturally get momentum behind them when they can take on meaningful responsibilities towards others.

Caring for a partner and kids is one way of taking on those kinds of responsibilities, but you're right that this isn't readily available to everyone. It never has been, really, but that can be especially apparent to people these days.

Work can be another way, but it needs to feel like you're actually helping something in a way that matters, and many people don't have those opportunities for work either. Much work is towards notoriously bullshit ends, and plenty of employers and clients can be degrading rather than appreciative.

But if you read your own post, or walk out your door and see your own neighbors, it's not hard to find people that need help. That's where the giant ocean of fulfillment is hiding in plain sight. Consumer-individualist culture just sort of forgot to teach people that, so one way to be practice it is to help people who need "a reason to go on" to find it in helping others themselves.

> FWIW, the missing element in this framing is real, substantive community. Not conversational or ephemeral community like you find online, but the kind of substantive community that engenders a network of mutual support.

This is one aspect of US' stereotypical work culture that always caught my attention: the way that work permeates in employees' personal lives.

Now I'm starting to see it the other way around: a lot of people simply do not have a social life, and work is used to fill that gap.

That would also explain chronic overworking. Why would anyone want to leave their job at 5PM when all they can do is be alone with their lonely thoughts? At least back at work they have people who are contractually forced to acknowledge their existence.

A few years ago someone told me a former team member of theirs committed suicide in the office, and was found the next day by other employees hanging from the ceiling. I couldn't understand why anyone would do such a thing, and specially at their workplace. Perhaps that was the only place they had in their lives and where they knew someone they knew would find them. Also a few years ago, when I switch jobs the first piece of office gossip I was told was how an employee tried to commit suicide by jumping off the building once he heard the news he was being fired.

Your career in general and your job in particular plays a critical role in your life, but if that's all you have then you are an economic downturn away from finding yourself at the bottom of a very deep pit.

I agree that we need real, substantive community. However, I'm skeptical of the helping-others-builds-community narrative. Shared service can create community, but to be sustainable the service is something that fills you up. I've done a lot of soup kitchen, helping at food banks, etc. work, and it's always been sort of a chore, despite doing it because of a strongly held value. Whereas I can spend a lot of time practicing beautiful choral music for a free concert and it's totally sustainable. Also, community is built among peers, but giving help is not necessarily a peer activity (depends on the help, how reciprocal the help is, pre-existing relationships, etc.).

But helping "people that need help" is not the same as taking meaningful responsibilities. If I take "meaningful responsibilities" towards my neighbors, that's likely to look like co-dependency unless there's some sort of meaningful responsibilities I'm receiving back, or a community (in the social, not geographic/cartographic sense) that that we are already both part of. In fact, it's hard to take on meaningful responsibilities if you are not already a member of some community. (Which is not a bad thing; you don't usually make someone new the leader of the group, and there are good reasons for that)

I agree, and lots of my irl efforts have actually been on building and improving community in my graduate program, and it’s been much more fulfilling than the actual research I’m doing. But as someone who is “the community guy” in their department, I’ve met a remarkable amount of indifference towards the idea of building community from people who just don’t value it. It’s really hard, especially in modern America, to find/build community. Remote work, lack of religion, inability to own a house, inability to have children, all make it harder than ever for others to find a reason to care about the people around them, I think.

I would upvote you tenfold, if I could.

Everybody needs to find some meaning in their lives. If there is none, you already know how it ends, and however you might try you will not change this ending.

In the past, people would find this meaning in religion, but these days seem mostly gone. Finding things you like and doing them seems like a good strategy but not bulletproof. But being a part of a community and contributing to it may work miracles. You can really feel you can impact other people's lives in a concrete, meaningful way, and it can give much deeper satisfaction than a good game, movie or meal.

Completely agree, and I have been feeling similarly. While I did manage to get a job, I have still been miserable. The work is not interesting or meaningful and working remotely is very isolating. It’s been discussed to death, but I think the lack of “third places” makes it very difficult to date or even spend time with friends.

Like you mentioned, without a spouse or kids it’s hard to find purpose. I don’t have an intrinsic drive to grind or make more money just for the sake of it.

I hope that things will get better with time, but I can’t think of any concrete reasons why they would. Of course some people will get married and have kids, but many won’t. It can be hard to find reasons to get up out of bed every day.

I am old, the biggest difference from when I was 20 to now is when I was 20 I knew I wasn't going to be the star of my own TV sitcom.

There is this constant barrage of bullshit now. "This 25year old makes $30k a month from a side hustle doing nothing and you can too!".

Life is basically the best it is has ever been but the expectations that came with this are just absurd.

If you think this tech job market is bad you can't imagine the dot com bust and 2002. Imagine graduating college in 2000 and starting the job hunt.

Nasdaq returns by year

2000 -36.84

2001 -32.65

2002 -37.58

-----

2022 -32.97

2023 +53.81

The second point is really important I think - the internet has skewed our perceptions of what is real so much that it warps our own sense of worth. Also the demise of religious institutions have forced people to judge themselves by their contributions to the economy - which is a pretty bad game to play given how many winner-take-all markets there are.

We need to teach students about well-being and when we have too much internet and not enough community.

> I’ve moved past it for now, luckily, but I’m seeing a lot of people struggle, particularly men, and get left behind, with virtually nobody trying to make us feel valued or supported on the societal level. Many men, especially those without prospects for getting married/having kids, really don’t have a good reason to go on except pure hedonism. And that can only go so far.

An honest question, not trying to start an argument: I wonder if you feel that men in particular are struggling because you don’t interact with women as often as you interact with men? Reading your main factors, it’s not hard to imagine women facing the same problems, especially in regard to the societal expectation of marriage/kids.

A fair question - as it turns out, I do interact with quite a few women. And while, yes, women face pressure to sacrifice family for a career (or vice versa), from what I understand, many women simply 1) Have a strong negative disposition to men/the idea of dating, 2) have their choice of men from dating apps, meaning they can date/start a family whenever/however they want, more or less, and 3) are either uninterested in giving birth, will "freeze their eggs" for whenever they decide to have a family, or are willing to adopt.

This is not to say that women do not face hardships in the modern world (I know many who face sexism, assault, abortion rights, etc), however, I feel the nature of these problems are fundamentally different, particularly around their narratives and how they are supported. I think women feel more supported, empowered, righteous, and angry than ever when facing these issues (rightfully so), while men are increasingly ignored, devalued, and thrown away, without the explicit support that women typically receive in media, hiring practices, fellowships, etc. There are lots of tangible things for women to point to which indicate that their future is getting better (sans abortion rights in some states), while I think men have plenty of reason to suspect that things will only get worse from their perspective.

[flagged]

[flagged]

My humble perspective, having gone through that, is that young men have it very hard to find their value. As a young man, after you've been past your teenage years young men don't get the "kid's pity" and unconditional love anymore. You become only as useful as the things you do, and what can you do as a young man? Specially if you haven't really grown up with a supportive father you end up in a limbo where you're not yet a man but nobody really tells you how to be a man. Equally women generally don't find men trying to figure things out very attractive. It is, then, easier to feel better with yourself when you're on your 30s and you are lucky enough to have found a way to figure things out by yourself. Then and only then you suddenly become "useful", attractive to women and respected by other men. Getting through the first stage without falling into suicide or hedonism is the hardest part.

Another problem, (at least here), is what happens if you "overcorrect" with regard to hedonism.

If you completely shun partying/clubbing/bars, casual sex, TV/social media addiction, etc... in favor of a more virtuous way of life (perhaps filled with more intellectual endeavors; without neglecting the body either, I should mention), you gain a superpower known as "invisibility from the female sight". And if you dare have standards about said opposite sex, $DEITY help you.

The state of things is really dire, let me tell you.

You can meet women at church... but that's another can of worms.

In my country, NZ, it's always been that way - men aged 15 - 30 are disproportionately higher in suicide statistics.

There's varying theories why, but our culture's emphasis on the "strong silent stoic man" is above and beyond the quiet stoicism expected of men in general.

That stoicism/quiet desperation was often used to sell products.

E.g., the Speights (a terrible beer) Southern Man...

https://youtu.be/q25aJ6UNvhw

https://youtu.be/Su0MCBim7FA

Barry Crump's "Good Keen Man" deerculler persona used to sell Hiluxes...

https://youtu.be/iqwnr2sza_o?si=mmRvEiEMa6pLKDbo

https://youtu.be/_yj1gff-ndc?si=mcGjE44Ys20g5ILz

https://youtu.be/bGGX8sPOFAg?si=jldACun8AdRPuUyC

https://youtu.be/VCkjBKjCikU?si=69GZwGalke2bc_nj

Barry Crump, a national legend based on his books about his deer culling days, was revealed after his death to be an alcoholic wife beater. Nobody was shocked.

And of course, rugby culture encourages quiet manly suffering.

Here's renowned All Black Buck Shelford talking about losing three teeth, suffering a concussion, and then losing a testicle, all in one game of rugby. But he kept playing on, because that's what a Kiwi man does, according to the mythos.

https://youtu.be/nvy32d-jk4E?si=a68eL2btXL8hmdNU

Young men who don't measure up to this artificial concept of masculinity then feel like even more of a failure, and well, you know.

> Young men who don't measure up to this artificial concept of masculinity then feel like even more of a failure, and well, you know.

I wouldn't call it artificial tho, if much the concept of masculinity got way softer compared to what past generations had to deal with. Nowadays a young man can live for up to 20 years or more without having to any responsibilities and no real life-endangering stress.

In Australia there’s no reason for young people to have hope about the future.

The rich, the old, the vested interests have an iron grip on the wealth, the housing, the politics and as a result, climate policy.

What’s the good bit about the future for young people, can someone tell me? Unless of course you are a child of the rich.

I heard this generation is called “generation rent”, soon enough “generation tent”.

That's an unnecessarily pessimistic take. There is plenty of jobs, they pay well compared to almost anywhere in the world, the country is huge with lots of natural resources and a small population. There are amazing beaches, nature and if things go bad, some social safety net. With that country size, cheap housing is possible - just not in the most desirable locations.

Our higher salaries are a insufficient to offset the current cost of living, which is growing at a faster rate.

Our country is physically large, with a low population density. Unless you are willing to sacrifice significantly (ie. Access to medical care), your are obligated to live near one of our (few!) cities.

We sell our natural resources to foreign interests, who automate extraction and pay literally zero tax.

The social safety net is significantly below the poverty line, and is stagnant in the face of the increasing cost of living.

https://youtu.be/kt7zARB_sxc

It's extremely hard to make friends here, our culture is a mixture of abuse (physical and sexual), doing drugs, drinking alcohol and getting drunk and gambling. There's no innovation here, house prices are insane, food is expensive.

You sound like a home owner.

Did I guess right?

No.

Oh, living in 'less desirable' locations! Why haven't any of us thought of that! I'll spread the news!

What do you consider 'cheap' housing? What are these fabled jobs where this cheap housing is? Can't make lattes for wankers, I mean, bankers while wfh. Will these jobs pay the rent for a single room in this cheap housing? Will they lease to parents? Where is it that we have all missed, right under our noses, that could magically fix our housing crisis by expanding our cities into? Even if the builders in this country weren't challenging each other for who can build the lowest quality, shortest lasting boxes of garbage? Where? Again ignoring the ridiculous amount of empty already built homes that exist as a blip in someone's property portfolio rather than as a thing for people to live in.

A social safety net? One that unlawfully (and at great cost) issued (wrong!) automated debt notices to some our most vulnerable?[0] The same one that was willing to pay $12000 per recipient to administer 'cashless debit cards'[1] which block people on said safety net from using the despicably small pittance they get at farmers' markets, on second hand furniture, or any of the only other ways people miraculously manage to stay alive while on it? $12000 a year is about as much as you can get from welfare payments and instead of just doubling the pay they'd prefer to just leave people to starve while in debt. If you can even get approved for getting welfare in the first place! The suffering is the point.

Our public health system is extremely underfunded. It's a joke. Still not as gutted as the poor NHS (...yet). If corporations paid tax, if we stopped throwing billions at submarines that will never be made, we could rival the world's best, but we choose not to.

Our famous beaches are essentially a luxury at this point. It takes hours to get to them. Nobody can afford the fuel or the time and energy.

I do thank my lucky stars that I'm here instead of somewhere that charges hundreds of dollars (but not if you apply to 17 different coupon places, I swear!) for an asthma inhaler but this 'lucky country' crap is extremely ignorant of the realities most of us face here. The worst part is that so many people here believe the despair so many of us face is 'unnecessarily pessimistic' and would rather whinge about that than consider for a second that the despair might be justified. It's almost treason according to murdoch media if you suggest that things don't actually need to be this hard. It's 'Unaustrayan' to have feelings or be poor or sick or homeless or different or to ask more of our country who actually could be making things as easy as you suggest. Again we choose not to.

Oh and this doesn't even cover if you're Black (Indigenous Australians are the most incarcerated population on earth; I'll leave that to you to look up), otherwise a person of colour, religious but not Christian, queer, disabled, chronically ill, old, have school-aged kids, or live in properly rural or remote areas. Honestly being a middle class white woman is pretty scary here, too. Being a man who doesn't or doesn't want to live up to the ridiculous hyper-masculinity standard is also scary. Our rates of suicide in men, particularly rural ones, are overwhelming and have been for ages.

Our nature is wonderful (...in the vanishingly small parts where we haven't utterly destroyed it). You've got that right. Bloody roos, though. Boxing rats who can go highway speeds but choose to jump in front of cars instead. Funny buggers lol.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-05/alp-drops-support-for...

If you have enough rich people who can afford to rent / own in cities close to the ocean, most people won't be able to afford the same. There are just too many people who would like to live in Bondi, Manly and similar (speaking about Sydney), so only those with the means will be able to. Either live inland or further out.

Disclaimer: lived in a nice suburb, but nowhere close to a beach.

That's extreme. There's so many worse place to be than Australia. I mean, sure, there's a lot of issues for the future, (there always were) but there's a lot of good things in life you don't have to pay for. Go for a walk with a friend for the start, it's nice outside. You don't have to be anywhere close to rich to have a nice life.

Do you own a home?

Why is home ownership critical to a meaningful life? I've rented my entire life, never even wanted to own until very recently, and it's been completely irrelevant to meaning in my life.

For that matter, for much of European history, most people did not own their home (the local nobility did), and were subsistence farmers.

Many strong connections to other people (mutally) is much more likely to bring meaning to your life than property ownership.

It's about safety and having a tomorrow. A lot of places where you won't live long without housing. You could live your whole life without strong connections to other people even if a miserable one.

Not having a major disruption to your whole life beyond your control is a meaningful thing, and a basic need. It could be reliable, predictable, stable source of income or saving, which allows you to rent without such concerns. It could be owning place to sleep, to eat, to invite friends.

Not being able to afford a house doesn't imply that you're in risk of being homeless. OP seems to be using home owning as the measure for having hope in life, which is ridiculous. Now when I lived in Beijing, rent was expensive (for any place a westerner would see as livable), the apartments were lousy, finding an apartment was a hassle, landlords were annoying, and I ended up moving every year. Sure, all the foreigners kvetched about finding an apartment. Every one of us had some sort of major disruption due to something out of our control (that's pretty much going to happen in China). None of us lost hope in life because of it.

It really depends on the place. Here in Japan, lots of people don't own, especially in big cities. However, rents are generally very stable and there's good legal protections for tenants. (Rents have been rising lately though.) On top of this, houses depreciate as they get older, because no one wants old buildings since they're 1) old and crappy and 2) more dangerous in earthquakes. So buildings depreciate to zero over ~30-40 years, though the land itself does not (and gains value in good locations). With lots of new housing units constantly being constructed, there's no artificial shortage of housing like most places.

Contrast this with the US, where zoning laws and NIMBYism prevent much new housing from being constructed, various laws prevent very small/efficient housing from being built (apartments in Tokyo can be quite tiny, but quite affordable), and lack of tenant protections all come together to make renting somewhat hazardous, because rents tend to go up quickly, much faster than market rate even (basically, to stay at the market rate, you need to rent a new place every year). So owning a home in America means avoiding the abuse from rental companies and ever-rising rents, and having a stable home and housing cost.

Japan also had no economic growth and had a population decline over the past couple of decades - this for sure must cool the housing market.

Houses generally appreciate over time as well in the United States, so many see them as ways to generate or preserve wealth.

I own a house, but my sister doesn't. She does worry about the impact of high property prices on her future, but I've never heard her express the kind of pessimism about the future of her life-in-general that you do. Her main focus right now is not property, it is trying to get into medicine. But that's the thing – so long as a person has a goal they are working towards, whatever the goal might be, that gives them hope and reason to live. When someone no longer has any goals that they believe are achievable, that's when they become hopeless.

I rented for almost my whole life. The change is convenient, but really not life changing. Definitely not "life worth living" level changing.

The point is made.

Anyone who says "cheer up, it's OK, all is great in Australia, you just need to smile, take a walk, smell the roses!", they always own a house.

I go to real life protests for both climate change and for better housing policy in the U.S. so I’m hardly someone who believes there are no problems.

And I’m also not a homeowner.

But the idea that someone, anyone, living in Australia has a worse outlook in life than 99% of humanity is absolutely not true.

But I have seen enough of that in person here as well, so I’m not questioning either the actual feeling or the validity of the feeling.

However, something appears to have changed where younger folks in a certain set of circumstances feel despair when someone of the same age under similar circumstances even a decade ago might not have felt that way.

I have to believe social media and the expectations it creates but also the way it bombards young people with issues that they can do nothing about today has some responsibility here.

Ahh the starving child in Africa means any complaints are void argument.

Peole shouldn't be homeless, struggling to purchase food or other basics day to day, just so that the entitled rich of Australia can continue to increase their wealth.

I would go as far as to say, if a single person can't afford to purchase these things, there should be a drastic, exponential tax on all revenue until the situation is resolved.

Starving children in Africa should shut the hell up and stop complaining. They don't have it so bad: they could be getting tortured too. /s

This is only true for young adult men. Middle-aged women still have higher suicide rates than young adult women.

What do you mean by "still"? Men have higher suicide rates in general all over the world.

By “still,” they meant that the article’s observation about younger men being more suicidal than older men doesn’t apply likewise to younger women & older women. So older women still are more suicidal than younger women.

Re-read what I wrote.

Sadly, women that don't land a man before beauty fades are far more likely to end up lonely.

Having responsibility gives men purpose. Having children gives women purpose. Lessons that should be taught not left to learning by experience. If left to experience, many don't learn it.

that's a pretty broad generalization. are you speaking of a specific culture?

It is broad because it applies to most humans throughout history regardless of culture.

having children creates responsibilities. it's not like men have responsibility and women don't. it's a false dichotomy about "purpose." that's what i meant by broad generalizations. lots of women don't want children and are quite happy.

This is a thread about suicide rates. The comment I responded to was specifically about older women committing suicide at a higher rate than younger women.

People need to feel like their life has meaning and purpose. Those can be found many different ways. However, having and raising a family is one way the majority of people in the world find meaning and purpose. My phrasing was purposeful.

The leading cause of suicide is depression. Childless women are 46% more likely to be depressed. Women are twice as likely to have depression than men. So, that puts childless women at a significantly higher risk of suicide than childless men. Men seem to have more paths to find purpose in life than having a family.

That said, having a family for both men and women is more likely to give both meaning and purpose to their lives. It also gives them both opportunity to not be lonely later in life.

What do the kids have to look forward to?

The reality is that homeownership and other pieces of the American dream are far out of reach for many of them and will be for the foreseeable future.

Couple that with the constant stream of climate doomerism they've been fed for the past decade and we shouldn't be surprised the kids aren't alright.

“Climate doomerism” has been around for at least 3 decades.

Heck, the last decade has seen more good news on the climate front than any decade before, with wind and solar energy becoming cheaper and growing faster than any other source of energy, EVs actually not just becoming a reality but an inevitability, and most countries setting carbon reduction goals something which didn’t even sound possible a few decades ago.

Tell the media as that’s not their narrative

It's becoming harder to see a bright spot in the future