
U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person - pseudolus
https://theconversation.com/teens-have-less-face-time-with-their-friends-and-are-lonelier-than-ever-113240
======
Zak
Part of the issue, I think is that teenagers are more restricted by parents,
laws, and business owners than they used to be.

As with younger children, parents are less likely now than in past decades to
allow their teenage children to travel alone or hang out in groups without
adults present. Legal restrictions compound the issue, with curfew laws being
increasingly common, as well as increased driving ages and graduated licenses.
Finally, businesses that used to be popular hangouts for teenagers, such as
shopping malls have become less welcoming, often having limits on when
teenagers are allowed on the premises without a parent.

~~~
Zenst
So true, in essence driving them into online friend interactions.

Makes you wonder what life will be like for children 50 years from now, and
how that would compare with today.

After there was a time when making explosives was a childhood right of passage
along with chemistry sets, making fires, even having a pocket knife. Today,
such common activities would not end well at all, however innocent the
intention. These are activities people still alive today will recall.

With that, online is still in part a wild-west and new playfield, open, less
restrictions compared to real life and with that, perhaps the logical outlet
for teenage freedom.

But even that is slowly being eroded away with the same mentalities that drove
children into 1984 style parenting.

With that, todays children may very well in their 50's look at the children of
the time and feel how restricted and curtailed they are compared to the
freedoms they enjoyed in their time. That would not surprise me, but equally,
when do laws, rules, restrictions reach a zenith when no more need be added or
changed! Until then, the lamentations of life march on.

~~~
paulsutter
Surely kids still try to make gunpowder, what are you talking about? And for
who but kids are pocket knives and chenistry sets made?

> there was a time when making explosives was a childhood right of passage
> along with chemistry sets, making fires, even having a pocket knife.

~~~
Zenst
In the UK, both are now illegal, can't even sell a knife to anybody under 18,
same with glue and many things above and beyond alcohol and tobacco. Equally,
having a knife in public, would be mandatory jail in the UK in the current
climate. For a child, they would be taken into care and some serious
nightmares for the parents from social services and the police.

As for explosives, all the above, but far worse. By default you would get
classed a terrorist until proven innocent style justice on that one, again the
current climate.

~~~
frosted-flakes
What kind of knives are we talking about? Are even mini Swiss Army knives with
1.5" blades banned? What about a multi-tool like a Leatherman Wave, which has
three 3" blades along with pliers, etc? I carry my leatherman everywhere I go,
and wouldn't blink if I saw a 14 year old with one. Ontario, Canada.

~~~
Zenst
The official line is:- [https://www.police.uk/crime-prevention-
advice/possession-of-...](https://www.police.uk/crime-prevention-
advice/possession-of-weapons/)

However, interpretation of what threatening is varies and for some people say
walking a dog, the sight of a knife of any form would be a call to the police
- however legal or not. This and the internet has demonstrated time and time
again, that whatever is said or done - their will always be some who will take
offence.

Take a look at - [https://www.knifefree.co.uk/](https://www.knifefree.co.uk/)
which is linked upon that page. Can see what type of message they are putting
out regarding knives, do recommend doing that quiz. Also interesting is the
boss button on the right (quick exit from site onto google).

But then the UK is very London centric in how laws and rules get driven and
more so - enforced. Compared to Canada, in which you have more wilderness, the
social culture is more at ease and as such the law/system - less reactionary.
Equally you have whole area's in which people don't lock their doors. Unheard
of in today's times in the UK alas (though I'm sure there are small hamlets of
hope). Though was common in the past, even in London.

~~~
chillingeffect
Wow, so if I, say _buy_ a cooking knife and get "caught" carrying it home from
the store, "A court will decide if you’ve got a good reason to carry a knife
if you’re charged with carrying it illegally."

Or if I take a chef's knife to a friend's house to cook dinner with them, the
same court will intervene? Presumably following an arrest?

That second link is just so creepy to me (pacifist American). I can see how it
uses language in such an incriminating way. It's so absolute: "When you carry
a knife, you're risking everything." That's a sublime exaggeration. Worst
case, I'm risking one life. Not trivial, but a far cry from "everything."

"knife crime has devastating personal effects on you, your friends, and your
family." Meh, it may. But mostly it sounds like the effects are all visited on
me by the government. Icky, over-reaching and emasculating.

I can see how it gives people who are already good the warm fuzzies, but
actual criminals will mock and sneer at this "effort." ...and it looks like
"knife crime" (as opposed to say "burglary" or "homicide", actual crimes, not
crimes directed by a specific weapon (again with that authoritarian language))
has nearly doubled in the last 5 years, so great job with your authoritarian
campaign, UK! /s
[https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42749089](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42749089)

~~~
DanBC
You've been given misinformation.

If you're carrying a cooking knife there's no reason to stop you or search
you. But if somehow there is a reason to stop and search you, and you have
your new knife in its packaging with a receipt the police will say "what's
this?" and you'll say "it's a cooking knife I've just bought and am taking
home" and they'll say no more about it unless eg you have a conviction for
stabbing people or you have a restraining order against you because you've
threatened to kill someone.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
So convicted criminals and people with restraining orders have to have someone
straw purchase the items required to have a properly outfitted kitchen?

In one of the Chinese social credit comment threads someone said "well of
course people who haven't run a foul of an authoritarian system generally
approve of it" and I think that applies here too.

------
_hardwaregeek
Idk if this is specific to my generation, but us young people suck at hanging
out. People never confirm whether or not they're going to an event. They flake
all the time, often without warning. If they're not flaking, they're
perpetually late, often absurdly (nothing like getting to a place and getting
a text about just leaving). It drives me nuts. But it's so ubiquitous, it's
hard to take a stand against it. It's like people forgot how to hang out with
friends.

~~~
pessimizer
When I was a kid, which is getting to be a long time ago, we never really
scheduled anything. People in our peer group tended to hang out in maybe 6-10
different locations - one being a particular bar, one being a particular
corner, one being a particular house, etc. Sometimes a location would
disappear, sometimes you'd hear about a new location.

On your downtime, you would go to one of those locations and join the group
already there, or loiter a little while until someone you knew showed up. If
nobody showed up, you'd drift to one of the other locations and do the same
thing. One out of 20 times you'd go home without seeing anybody that you were
interested in hanging out with.

That's how a commons works, I think. The problem is a lack of a commons, and a
suspicion of people in public who aren't currently in the process of shopping.
The idea that in this alienated time I'd go to a particular restaurant where
people go, drink coffee and just wait for somebody to show up that wanted to
hang out almost sounds utopian or suspiciously foreign, but it was my life
from probably age 12 to 24.

~~~
winningcontinue
The commons thing does sound pretty magical the way you described it. For me,
there were often anti-social people at those common areas. People who you
sometimes didn't want to run into, who were really certain subcultures and
they didn't always mix.

------
iheartpotatoes
I volunteer at STEM after school program at a Northern California suburban
public school in a very affluent county. Engineers from the local companies
work on projects with hacker kids.

It's a pretty dreamy albeit "canned" town, I never lived in a place that nice.
Lots of cul de sacs and "mini malls" and "canned fun" places that are very
walkable (unlike the poorer suburbs where kids have to cross 8 lanes of
traffic to meet at a Shari's).

I noticed that before I show up at 5PM (I get to leave work early two fridays
a month, yay!, the kids are sitting around on their phones. And when I leave
at 7pm, kids just go home with their parents. First: few of them drive. WTF?!
Then the weird part: there's a frigging movieplex down the street with a bunch
of restaurants and TWO parks on opposite sides of the main E/W street... and
they just ... go home. WTF.

Maybe they are lying to the adults in the room, but the parents claim they go
home and text or play computer games all night.

~~~
Pfhreak
> few of them drive. WTF?!

Rad? I didn't need to drive in High School, and I still found plenty to do
back in the 90s. Kids today have even more options.

> there's a frigging movieplex down the street with a bunch of restaurants and
> TWO parks on opposite sides of the main E/W street... and they just ... go
> home. WTF.

First, movie theaters are awful. Second, there's so much cool stuff to do once
you get home! I can go home and play a space marine with my friends, or build
castles, or ride dragons, or be the last one standing in any number of
variations on king of the hill. I can jump online with my crew and be
literally anything you can imagine. With tools like Roll20, I can tell stories
and roleplay. I can watch Netflix with my friends online.

Restaurants are expensive. Parks are fun for a bit, but it seems pretty out of
touch to say, "What The Fuck."

~~~
nodemaker
Is being so boring and antisocial a norm these days ? :D (Just busting your
balls haha)

I think a lot of us deeply care about the future society that will cater to
the people that are currently young. And it seems remarkably boring,
superficial and for the lack of a better word, just devoid of anything fun.

In the end noone cares if this is a subculture (there were enough subcultures
when I was in school i.e goths, metalheads etc), its more of a problem if this
behaviour becomes uniform across all cultures and mainstream.

~~~
Pfhreak
My argument is that it's not anti social. It's maybe less visibly social, but
being in a group voice or video chat while playing board or video games is
definitely a social activity. Or building something together - computers
enable us to engage in storytelling and art in ways our ancestors could only
dream of.

Yeah, sure, they aren't social in the same way you were. But you weren't
social in the same ways your parents were either. Calling the younger
generations antisocial because they've fully embraced technology as a core
part of their identity smacks of patronism to me. Kids these days with their
rock and roll, so antisocial!

~~~
Symbiote
So then, how does sex happen? (Or any intimacy.)

That's the bit the old people don't understand.

Board games are fine, as would be video games in the same room as the other
players. But online?

Note that the same worry would apply to a youth who spent all their free time
reading alone in the past.

~~~
notyourday
It does not. That's why we have a massive drop in teenage pregnancies.

~~~
Depooty
I disagree, kids have more access to sex education than ever now and tinder is
a really good tool for hookups. They just know to use a condom. I remember my
dad thought that if the woman was on top and you came inside her she wouldn't
get pregnant because of gravity, 9 months later I showed up. Thank you
catholic school for only teaching abstinence.

------
bobthepanda
There's also the fact that when you're in the suburbs, you need a chauffeur
until you can drive. American adults are working more and more, and thus less
available to take children to outside activities, which these days are also
further and further apart.

~~~
Pfhreak
I grew up in the suburbs. We took this thing called a 'bus' into the city when
we needed to.

~~~
baroffoos
We had a bus in my suburb. The bus stop was an hours walk away so you had to
be driven there and it leaves once an hour and doesn't go to anywhere your
friends are so if you wanted to visit a friends house you would have to take 2
bus trips in each direction which would probably add up to about 5 hours
travel time in a day.

Or you could just invite them to an online game and have fun right away.

------
m463
> It turns out that today’s teens are socializing with friends in
> fundamentally different ways – _and also happen to be the loneliest
> generation on record._

This is a very sad observation.

(as I sit at a computer, not looking at anyone, and type these words)

------
hannasanarion
All the sillhouettes of kids in the banner have undercuts and it makes me
shivver. Hate that style. I guess I'm an old man now.

Anyway, I'm hardly surprised that kids aren't spending time with friends in
person, because nobody likes spending time with people in person as default.
In my childhood in the 90s, I did it only for events that require it, like
board games or sports, or when the alternatives are boring or unavailable,
like when I haven't had a new game to play in a while, or my sister was
hogging the internet.

The separation has only increased as at-home activities have gotten less
boring and more available, and as physical presence became less neccessary for
social activities like games.

AIM was great, we could chat without having to be physically together.

Battle.net was great, we could play games without having to be physically
together.

Xbox Live was great, we could play games AND chat at the same time without
having to be physically together. (many fond memories of high school nights
quizzing each other on history while blowing each other up in Halo 3)

Facebook was great, we could share stories and media without having to be
physically together, and asynchronously as a bonus.

I am not convinced that face-to-face interaction is an inherent good. The last
several decades of technological development have been the story of people
striving to spend less time with each other physically. Especially given the
article's proposed explanation that "friend groups meet on instragram now, and
kids without instagram are lonely", the barriers to telecommunication are
lower than ever before.

Or maybe we should cut this thread short and save the discussion for Linuxfest
Northwest.

~~~
darkpuma
> _" because nobody likes spending time with people in person as default."_

That's very far from true.

~~~
mises
Yeah, I'm not quite sure where he got this. I'm an introvert, and I still
really enjoy spending time in-person with close friends. In fact, I don't do
that well relating to people over the internet (at least not emotionally
speaking).

~~~
stephenhuey
Sounds a big like they are from the planet in Asimov’s The Naked Sun in which
people live miles apart and only see each other through holograms, never in
person.

~~~
1auralynn
If I recall correctly, the fate of that planet in one of his later books was
basically a small population of androgynous people who reproduced asexually
and lived on robot-run plantations.

It's something I think about from time to time.

------
penciljencil
For the less socials teens, it's much easier for them to play an online game
with each other than to actually meetup in person. I would know, because I
used to be one of them.

Meeting together in person used to give me tremendous anxiety and as a result
I would always vouch for taking the easy way out. In hindsight, I wish I had
actually made more of an effort to hangout during my high school years because
deep down I did enjoy those personal interactions. Nowadays I'm a lot more
social than I was in the past and a lot more happier as a result too.

------
908087
"Tech" corporations have successfully conned a large portion of the population
into believing that clicking a thumbs up icon under a photo of someone's
breakfast or mindlessly scrolling through useless reposted memes qualifies as
"staying in touch".

Even when people do venture out, it often seems to be for the sole purpose of
collecting carefully planned and staged selfies that they feel will gain them
more thumbs up clicks.

It's a sad situation, and I feel bad for the kids who are growing up in a
world where this shit has a death grip on all of their peers.

------
AmazingAtalanta
I wonder if one of the biggest drivers of loneliness isn't necessarily that
kids are spending more time on their phones or even that they have less face
time with their friends, but that their social media can tell them more about
what their friends are doing when they aren't together. First, everyone knows
people curate their social media presence so that they look cool and that they
are doing fun things. Second, if two of my friends in my group of friends hung
out, I wouldn't necessarily know about it until after the fact. I wouldn't be
able to see fun images of my friends or even people who were like the "cool
kids" hanging out. Essentially, that limited the amount of FOMO you could
experience because you just didn't have that ability.

I definitely think some of it also has to do with the level of control and
protection we try to place on kids as well. It's just probably discouraging to
kids or, worse, they sense their parent's fear that something will happen to
them so they become afraid and ultimately pull themselves back from social
interactions.

I wonder if kids also tend to feel more lonely because parents have also
increased their smartphone usage. When I go out to restaurants, I feel like I
am more likely to see entire families on their phones sitting around the table
instead of talking with one another. That can't help either.

------
Vagantem
Interesting how 12th-graders are as lonely as they where in the 70s & 80s
(almost no difference). What happened in 2006 that made loneliness drop so
much?

~~~
lskopwol
Probably advent of instant messengers made them feel less lonely, culminating
around 2006-2008 when modern social networks really took off, but peaking in
today's result of every post on fb/twitch/instagram engendering social anxiety
and thus 'loneliness'.

~~~
bencollier49
I reckon you're right. This was peak Yahoo Instant Messenger time, and it
launched in 1998, just before the graph starts moving downwards.

~~~
cortesoft
Really? I feel like peak instant messenger time was around 2001 or so... I
wonder if it has to do with how old we are?

~~~
gowld
Peak for _you_ was likely when you were a teen.

But overall? In 2001 computers weren't ubiquitous nor portable. Middle-class
kids were on IM on their desktops and maybe laptops for max a few hours per
day.

Now kids have phones for IM all day and night.

~~~
cortesoft
The grandparent comment was saying that 2006-2008 was peak instant messenger,
and people using messengers on phones were certainly not common during those
years.

------
arandr0x
There may be a fear element that also affects adults -- some time ago, I was
at a work party at a bar in a major city. (Nice bar, ritzy area) Everybody
else either came in groups by car or had a hotel within walking distance;
mine's quite a way out. Shortly past midnight I'm tired of watching people act
stupid and tell folks I'm walking back (alone). Most of them were surprised I
was willing to do that!

But in my youth, also in a major city, I'd walk back from the movies or
wherever with other kids around 1-2am all the time. You had to know which
areas were lit and not stare strangers straight in the eye, but that's kinda
normal, and certainly no one then felt walking was inherently dangerous. What
world do we live in that a bunch of semi drunk adults can't handle the night
for 2 miles?

No wonder their kids are spending their lives' quietest hours in front of a
screen if that's the risk tolerance calibration of the parents.

------
ctulek
This is a very poorly written article, if not poorly done science. (See
Criticism section of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Twenge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Twenge))

Showing two graphs with opposite directions and claiming one is the cause of
the other is not how one should present their claims.

It could be just the case that because of some other reason(s) teens spend
less face-to-face time with their friends, and they spend more time on social
media.

Beside, the second graph already shows high loneliness rates in 80s, too. Is
this also because of social media which did not exist in 80s?

There can be so many other reasons for teens to feel depressed: economy,
global warming, the increasing gap between rich and poor, mortgage crisis, and
now student debt crisis, so on and on.

Please do not divert our attention to wrong reasons, or please make sure that
you are really on top of your game.

------
bitxbit
The sense of community is gone. And it really takes a village to raise a child
but that’s disappeared in the US outside of small rural communities.

~~~
hbosch
No, sense of community is actually stronger than ever I think. But those
communities are less geographic and much more ideological. The communal bond
these days happens more in ideas and beliefs than in physical proximity.
Social media made it so, and this shifted sense of community has given rise to
increasingly radical and extreme ideologies — but also much stronger bonds in
my opinion.

~~~
jmoss20
That's a slightly different sense of community though -- there are things that
local (geographically) communities can provide that online communities simply
can't. Some of those things are probably pretty important.

~~~
hbosch
This is an important conversation, but being on HN I cannot resist...

> there are things that local (geographically) communities can provide that
> online communities simply can't

Identify this delta! It may just be the seed to the next big social network.
:)

~~~
gthtjtkt
You've never heard of Meetup.com?

------
Animats
Juvenile violent crime rates are falling in sync with teens spending less time
with others. Compare the chart in [1] with the parent article.

Maybe the rate of violent crime is roughly constant for time spent with
others.

[1] [https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/vanishing-
violence/](https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/vanishing-violence/)

------
mrhappyunhappy
I think it’s just an indication of how much more addicting technology is than
people care to admit. To say that there was nothing fun to do back in the
olden days would be false. These days there are way more options that are much
more addicting and gratifying. Why play in the park when you can blast people
online. Games are designed to build addiction and sure enough it works - kids
would rather fame than do anything outside.

I don’t know if there is any easy way around this. I personally struggled with
gaming addiction for the longest time and kept lying to myself that I was in
total control. Looking back I feel sorry for all the kids who are sucked into
the world of gaming now, especially when adults who grew up gaming themselves
are nothing wrong with it. I tuned into a random twitch stream one time with
this grown ass guy playing some mmo and his little kid came in the room and
asked daddy to play with him. He just dismissed the kiddo and told him to go
find mommy. Really fucking sad.

~~~
baroffoos
>To say that there was nothing fun to do back in the olden days would be
false.

I think people are saying the opposite. When I think back at all the most fun
things I did as a kid, a large chunk of them are totally unavailable to most
kids now.

What is there for a kid to do outside now? Most of them could go outside and
walk for hours in any direction and not find anything but rows of houses and
roads. Likely all of their friends live so far away that walking there isn't
an option.

Why play in the park when there may be no park you can get to without your
parents driving you there and when you get there you find no one your age or
that you know.

------
plainOldText
According to some experts, spending more time on social media and less time
face to face, might result in emotional under development as the conditions
for the formation of the brain circuitry in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) are
not adequately met. [1]

The OFC is not well understood, but it has been implicated in mental disorders
such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder,
addiction, etc.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2YdpvnwtGc&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2YdpvnwtGc&feature=youtu.be&t=704)

------
dawhizkid
From my experience, the feeling of loneliness has little to do with face time
with friends. You can feel "lonely" even if you're constantly surrounded by
friends/family.

------
Causality1
"the generation I call “iGen” that’s also called Gen Z"

I am judging this author very harshly for making up their own label for
something everybody else already has a name for.

------
nstj
The irony is not lost on me that this is currently the top post on a “social
news website”.

~~~
Atheros
HackerNews is a content aggregator. There's nothing social here; you and I
aren't going to look at or remember each other's usernames.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Communicating with who I presume are other people seems kind of social to me.

------
danschumann
The competitive nature of the world, as felt by youth in particular, might
have something to do with it. Spending time "just hanging out" might seem like
a waste of time when you see people your age making millions of dollars
online. I guess this is another side of the "comparing your life to other
people's" problem.

------
krob
Eventually kids today will experience life not too unlike Brandon Fraser in
the film blast from the past. In total isolation until adulthood. Majorly
unprepared for what life has to offer them. But he is smarter than average in
that film, but the depth of his social isolation will be reality.

------
DFXLuna
This article is pretty interesting. However, if you read closely you'll see
that they fail to justify their implication that digital media access is
causing young people to feel more lonely. It's speculation that appeals to
readers "common sense".

------
vfinn
It's more difficult to find interesting people nearby than it's to find
interesting people in the internet. It could be also, that it's easier to
develop online identity than it's to develop an identity in real life. If
people feel they can connect with other people the way they are able to
connect in real life, it's easy to see why making connections face to face
decreases: your looks don't matter, your speech impediment don't matter, your
disabilities don't matter; if you're strange, you find similarly strange
people online; if you have rare interests, you find company, etc...

------
tzakrajs
tl;dr: technology in the late 90s and mid 00s gave power to users to be more
social on their own terms, technology in the late 00s took power away from
users and gave it to platforms to dictate social interaction with
notifications

It appears that this dip in loneliness started as early as the late 90s when
internet and cell phone technology was connecting us and enabling us to be
more, deliberately, social. Perhaps in the late 90s to mid 00s we found the
sweet spot for balance between social technology and loneliness. After the mid
2000s, Facebook became a thing, smart phones became ubiquitous, and user
behavior was increasingly driven by non-deliberate means: notifications.

Notifications are making people miserable because its turned social into a
fucking chore. You are less likely to have the social engagement you decided
upon, and instead to have one generated for you by an algorithm.

~~~
stcredzero
_Notifications are making people miserable because its turned social into a
fucking chore._

It always was a chore, though, at least for anyone at all introverted. Even in
the days before cellphones, I would sigh a sigh of relief when I could put
down the phone. It was the same sigh when I closed the door after a visit from
a salesperson or a service person. It's the same sigh of relief when I get
home from a function at the city club.

Not every place you go in public is a place you feel at home to be your real,
unguarded self.

~~~
coding123
I don't know - I kinda see it like the show stranger things. That's how I grew
up. We'd bike, walk, or whatever show up to our friends house. Parents didn't
have instant communication back then, so the expectancy factor wasn't there.
All that mattered was that when the sun was dimming, we'd have to be home for
dinner.. Any time after school and before the dimming was our time. Like the
goonies.

Damn. Damn no really damn, the current generation doesn't fucking have the
goonies. That's just so sad.

~~~
scoggs
I hate to be silly but they really should be and probably are retreating to
their homes when dusk comes around to avoid the creepers and such.

------
RandomInteger4
Outside of virtual settings replacing physical settings, perhaps one
possibility is the version of ourselves we present online is collectively
making everyone lonelier.

What I mean by this is that in order to seem like someone that others would
want to hang out with, we present our best selves, making us appear more
social than we are, thus those are the only versions anyone ever sees. People
simultaneously know that they're not as social as they present themselves,
while forgetting to assume the same about the version others present, thus
they assume everyone is having fun without them.

That or I'm just projecting ...

------
mitul_45
Similar things are discussed in this year's World Happiness Report –
[http://worldhappiness.report/ed/2019/the-sad-state-of-
happin...](http://worldhappiness.report/ed/2019/the-sad-state-of-happiness-in-
the-united-states-and-the-role-of-digital-media/).

Specially figure 5.4 makes it pretty clear: more internet hours = less
happiness.

------
rasz
The Machine Stops is getting closer and closer.

------
rygxqpbsngav
> the drop accelerated after 2010 – just as smartphones use started to grow.

Does anyone think not giving them access to phones till they go to college and
encourage them instead to play sports with neighboring kids help? (assuming
both neighbor parent agree to this!) Is that any practical anymore?

~~~
ashelmire
I think that’s a good idea. Of course, I was a teen right up until that dip
(was 20 when the iPhone came out) and didn’t have a cell phone until college.
But I was a computer geek, gamer, and script kiddie since middle school. But
every other night in high school I was sneaking out to hang out with friends
and girlfriends. Played sports every day. Our college years were also when
binge drinking was more accepted and there were far more parties - colleges
have cracked down hard on that.

Teens today seem very well behaved in comparison. But it seems like they don’t
have much fun. We’ve given them outrage culture, a nanny state, and more
restrictive schools though, so is this really surprising?

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deanalevitt
I wonder how this differs by location. I grew up rural, and my childhood
experience was wildly different from suburban and city kids.

While I loved video games, I also rode horses or ATVs to see neighborhood
friends and the area kids had large open spaces in which to explore and get up
to mischief in.

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mcv
But more time with their friends online.

My 9 year old son (admittedly not a teen) had a friend over, but at some point
the friend went home because the two wanted to play together.

That sentence would have made no sense when I was a kid, but it's apparently
how things work now. Blew my mind a bit.

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acd
I think that there is less time spent with friends is also a reason there is
more mental health issues. People need to see friends in real person not just
via online mediums.

A lot of more online possibilities also leads to a world where people do more
things on their own.

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diminish
It maybe be a good development, like a preparation for lonely future life in
space exploration where most people will live in harmony with robotic beings
and drive avatars, rovers and drones in a game like environment.

Also it will cease epidemics easier and social anxiety.

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longhorn_alum
They are also using drugs less and getting pregnant at a lower rate

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bgdkbtv
I guess sex, drugs and rock-n-roll is the ultimate path to happiness :D

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holtalanm
teens? hell most millenials might be like that, too.

i see my friends every other month if im lucky, but i play video games with
them nightly. Friends i met in college that ended up moving away, but we still
hang out and keep in touch online.

i used to have one friend that lived close by but he recently moved thousands
of miles away, too. so now, 90% of my interactions with my friends is online.

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nraynaud
wasn't the whole point of communication networks reducing transportation
costs?

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jebernier
Wow, groundbreaking. How much did that study cost?

