The evidence is equivocal on whether screen time is to blame for rising levels of teen depression and anxiety — and rising hysteria could distract us from tackling the real causes.
As a middle schooler I was afraid that Al-Queda would carry out a terrorist attack in my hometown or that Saddam would use his WMDs on the US. In high school, my grandparents got laid off and lost the farm during the great recession. And yet I just had the local news that was telling me the bad news of the day.
My point being, it can’t be healthy being bombarded with hours and hours of bad news every day doomscrolling as opposed to a 15 minute news broadcast in the evening. Especially for kids who don’t have the perspective and experience to know its gonna be OK.
Except everything points to it not getting better. This isn’t like a possible terror attack. We’ve known about climate change and have had 40 years to do something about it and it has been ignored. What evidence do they have to show it will all work out okay?
Edit: okay after re-reading your comment I noticed I got it wrong and then typed the text, but I’ll leave it here just because it took me way too long to type it.
We have science, geology to be exact! There once was a reservoir beneath what‘s today‘s Russia of ~2x the amount of fossil fuel currently existing. That thing got ignited by magma, exploding an area the size of Russia and covering Eurasia in 2 ft of lava and making the CO2 levels extremely high, even rising the temperature to an average of 200 F (IIRC). This resulted in Mega Hurricanes the size of a continent with wind-speeds at the speed of sound, acid rain, etc etc, that lasted about 200 Million years, effectively killing 99.6% of all life on earth. Only after that long time then the Carbon-Silicate was balanced again.
The earth doesn’t care about that, it will recover. But we won’t.
As a middle schooler I was afraid that Al-Queda would carry out a terrorist attack in my hometown or that Saddam would use his WMDs on the US. In high school, my grandparents got laid off and lost the farm during the great recession. And yet I just had the local news that was telling me the bad news of the day.
My point being, it can’t be healthy being bombarded with hours and hours of bad news every day doomscrolling as opposed to a 15 minute news broadcast in the evening. Especially for kids who don’t have the perspective and experience to know its gonna be OK.
Except everything points to it not getting better. This isn’t like a possible terror attack. We’ve known about climate change and have had 40 years to do something about it and it has been ignored. What evidence do they have to show it will all work out okay?
Edit: okay after re-reading your comment I noticed I got it wrong and then typed the text, but I’ll leave it here just because it took me way too long to type it.
We have science, geology to be exact! There once was a reservoir beneath what‘s today‘s Russia of ~2x the amount of fossil fuel currently existing. That thing got ignited by magma, exploding an area the size of Russia and covering Eurasia in 2 ft of lava and making the CO2 levels extremely high, even rising the temperature to an average of 200 F (IIRC). This resulted in Mega Hurricanes the size of a continent with wind-speeds at the speed of sound, acid rain, etc etc, that lasted about 200 Million years, effectively killing 99.6% of all life on earth. Only after that long time then the Carbon-Silicate was balanced again.
The earth doesn’t care about that, it will recover. But we won’t.