I wonder how much of this is attributable to legalization or other factors.
Teen Alcohol use has gone down ~50% over the last 30 years, and but there has been no legalization effort there. Similarly, teen sex rate has also gone down ~50% over the same time period.
Overall, abstention from behaviors seems to be a major trend. I would be curious to know if this is due to a cultural aversion to perceived risky behaviors, lack of autonomy, or some other factor like rate of behavior modification medicine.
As someone who just quit doing high school senior photography last year I think it’s a lot more simple:
They don’t have time. I can’t tell you how incredibly hard it is to schedule (and especially reschedule) sessions with many of them. A lot of kids always have some sport or other after school activity going on. Those sports often have training before the school day, after the school day, with actual competitions or more training on weekends.
Oh, and summer is no exception.
Combine that with loads of homework and they’re being run ragged.
That rings true. I chalk that up into "lack of autonomy" category.
I feel like modern kids have their life path set out on steel rails. The whole system is set up to see who can grind away hardest so that someday they can be an obedient and hard working corporate cog.
In the 90's and early 00's, we didn't even have homework and could get into top tier colleges. The kids in my family are now doing 4 hours of busywork a day.
The incentives of education today care very little about talent and are one big struggle session.
Or, the "always there" nature of screen activities makes it very easy to never do anything else.
When I was a kid we had no mobile phones, nor did we have computers or internet. if you wanted to talk with your friends you had to go meet up with them in person. So hanging out at the mall or at a park or an arcade was pretty common. So were after-school activities, sports, band, clubs, etc. A lot of this stuff, being away from home, was marginally or totally unsupervised, so there was a lot more opportunity to try "illegal" things.
I think I've seen the sex thing attributed to the "loneliness epidemic" and internet use that comes up alot.
If that is true, makes sense for the same cause to apply to smoking and drinking. Drinking beers by yourself as a teen is weird, you generally at least start that stuff with friends.
Most people our age in general are much more cautious about decisions because a bad mistake like an unplanned pregnancy can ruin your life.
Also, in general, abstinence and non-abstinence doesn't have any moral baggage for us. We aren't judging you if you choose to do drugs or have sex, but we also aren't judging people who choose not to do that stuff.
Caution was always a thing, but societal and peer pressure is much less now.
Look at older Millenial shows like Futurama and Archer. They are hilarious, but they absolutely perpetuate the idea that drinking alcohol is cool and a core part of being an adult.
On the other hand, a Zillenial or Gen Z targeted show like Bojack Horseman, Rick and Morty, or Solar Opposites doesn't show substance abuse in a similar manner - it still makes jokes about it, but also shows the dark side.
In high school getting a fake id to drink some beer, getting laid, or smoking weed or cigarettes with the stoners just isn't a cultural milestone anymore.
It's like what Chef said in South Park - "There's a time and a place for everything, and that's college"
It's more accessible what the negative consequences are. For example, I doubt many people 50 years ago knew what a lung looks like after a lifetime of smoking, or exactly how much it increases your cancer rates. Now everyone's seen the photos even if they aren't a smoker.
When I was growing up in the 1980s in the US, anti-smoking campaigns were everywhere all the time every day: on TV, in magazines, posters, etc. A lung damaged by lifetime smoking was a common visual.
So I don't think that information is much more accessible, broadly speaking, though Internet access has certainly increased the amount of information on the topic that's readily accessible.
The shift in attitude could be owing to other factors, or maybe it just took time for the warnings to sink in, i.e. generationally.
I think the definition of "ruin your life" is different now than it was in the 80s. Stakes are higher for kids now, and one little mistake can put you on the road to the have-nots instead of the haves.
Back when I was in high school, you could make mistakes and still end up successful. You could get a few B's in your grades, you could decide not to do so many sports and extracurriculars, you could get detention, you could even get in light trouble with the police for horsing around--and still make it into a good University and move on to a good career. I know because I made all of those mistakes. Plus, the consequences for being mediocre were not too severe. B students had community college, C and D students had decent jobs at the mill and the factory or could learn a trade, and so on.
Today, the bar for entry into a comfortable, middle class career is so high, that my kid needs to make zero mistakes. She has to get straight As, she has to stay out of any kind of trouble, she has to have the right polished "profile" for all the various career- and life-gatekeepers she will meet and need to pass. And if she doesn't pass the gatekeepers, where is she going to end up? There is no safety net and no real humane jobs left for lower-performers. Life is so much more bifurcated now, the kids know it, and they stress about not making a mis-step.
In the 80s I was competing with my small town. Now, kids are competing with the entire world.
I think you absolutely on to something, but I wonder how much of this a shift in perception vs reality.
I agree the linear progression of school>College>good job seems a lot more cutthroat and inflexible. That said, it seems like there are still lots of alternative paths out there for smart motivated people- they just arent clearly paved.
I have a long time to think about it, but I'm not even sure if I will encourage my kids to go to college, for the reasons you outlined. They may be better off doing work that isnt readily outsourced. Much of this will depend on what the economy looks like in 15 years.
As it stands today, I'd be tempted to give my kid 150k to start a plumbing business instead of paying for college.
It's absolutely a shift in reality. In the past, flunking out of school and working at your local McDonalds wasn't a great life, but you could afford a tiny shithole apartment and buy your weekly beer and hang out with the other people who didn't finish high school and live a meager life and shoot the shit.
Now, housing is way more expensive. Basic things are more expensive. McDonalds hires less and pays less relatively to what they used to.
I just went up state and visited a couple friends who failed to go to college or do anything with their lives. Nearly everyone is gone from the home town, because all the jobs are in cities. Small rural towns are basically empty of younger people. The few jobs that do exist are AWFUL, give you less agency than in the past, have zero upwards mobility because every single company is either a tiny business where the owner is the manager or a giant megacorp that pushes management down from Corporate, and STILL pay less than that burger flipping job did. They are soulless. They have almost no friends, almost no options, almost no money, and the place they live is literally dying around them, because it has been for 40 years.
More women go to college, so more of the people left in tiny rural hometowns are lonely men, who cannot find a partner, because there literally aren't many available.
They look at the next 40 years of their lives and see nothing. There's nothing to hope for. There's nothing to attempt to improve for. There's no chance that someone will offer them a good job, because everything is owned by like six companies.
>As it stands today, I'd be tempted to give my kid 150k to start a plumbing business instead of paying for college.
Guess what, being in the position to give your kid $150k period means they are already near the top of the food chain. The vast majority of Americans growing up can't even come close to that. Having a parent or parents that have that kind of expendable income is already chart topping levels of "Has a support structure they can rely on". None of the kids suffering from "no options" syndrome had that.
> Why do you think the caution is higher? do you have any thoughts on what changed?
In the US, Roe v Wade obviously. In Germany, more and more doctors willing to perform abortions are retiring and less new doctors enter the force [1], leaving pregnant women (or women who think they might get pregnant) pretty much down on their luck.
Seems like sex has been trending down since the 80's or 90's. I dont think it was because teens had premonitions of the 2022 overturn of Roe.
Edit: It seems the correction actually goes the opposite direction. Teen sex is lowest in blue states that are most protective of abortion, and highest in red states. California take the cake with lowest teen sex rate [1]. Correlation obviously isnt causation, but it is interesting to see the clear cultural differences in teen sex.
Weed is uniquely fun to do by yourself. It's the ultimate drug for zoning out on the computer and playing video games with. Weed is the perfect drugs for "incelish" lonely teenager who sit at home all day - an increasingly large percentage of the youth.
There are probably many/a combination of reasons. One thing I think that hasn't been brought up in this thread yet is a smaller amount of popular media portraying marijuana use in a tolerable light.
In terms of movies, how few and far between are big weed movies? Was the last one Pineapple Express, 15 years ago? Go back a few decades and there were a bunch of big movies, songs, etc. year after year about smoking weed.
it kinda seems to me like teenagers are abstaining from behaviors altogether, not just risky ones. possible explanations that come to mind are widespread anhedonia (depression) and the the fact that suburban kids who are too young to drive can't leave their homes without their parents.
> Gen Z men have been becoming more and more conservative politically, maybe it also translates into more conservative views on drugs and alcohol.
i'm not sure that's the right way to read that.
if you cut out the extremes (of the content Gaussian) you see that much content geared towards GenZ males is of self-care nature: go to the gym, take care of your own body, avoid alcohol and other drugs, take care of your mental health and go to therapy if you can, read philosophy.
it's a beautiful change since i was a teenager (~15 years ago), way much healthier than what i was exposed to as a teenager.
it's not problems-free of course, but still, i view it as positive change.
Unfortunately, rates of depression, misery, and loneliness are also significantly up, so I wouldn't be so fast to call the overall cultural change a healthy and beautiful win. I wonder how much these factors go hand in hand.
From what I've seen they go hand and hand a lot. All anecdotal of course, but much of the "self-improvement" content I've seen for young men is from the angle that they are failures, and they can "cure" their inadequacies through various channels.
Of course it's not really true, just a bit true. Going to the gym won't make you stop hating yourself, any bodybuilder will tell you that. Going to the gym, no-fap, etc are all chosen as channels because they provide an immediate sense of accomplishment while being relatively easy. But they don't materially improve the circumstances of your life.
It's simple to spend an hour at the gym and you will immediately feel better. But you didn't magically gain friends, a community, a sense of belonging or a reason to live. Those require being uncomfortable and pushing yourself mentally, emotionally, and socially. That's much more difficult than pushing weight.
Ultimately young men just want to believe and feel like they're doing something right.
> Unfortunately, rates of depression, misery, and loneliness are also significantly up, so I wouldn't be so fast to call the overall cultural change a healthy and beautiful win. I wonder how much these factors go hand in hand.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I do want to say that we're much more aware of mental health issue than we were 10 years ago. I was quite depressed myself as a teenager, yet it was just a common thing to "man up" and don't express that.
Current teenagers might be more open about what's going on in their head, and i think it's beautiful.
I think it's one of those issues that we used to ignore in the past, and now that we don't do that anymore, we're perceiving it as an new emergency. But it's not "new".
Note that the person you replied to did not say it was a negative change; they said they're adopting more conservative attitudes. I don't think what you said actually disagrees with them. While niches like straightedge exist, at least in the US today, the vibe I get is that things like temperance/abstinence and self-improvement (especially of one's body) are usually conservative-coded in the mainstream.
The downvotes you experience from making a super obvious connection is indicative of why democrats have a real risk of losing this election.
The inability to sense the collapse in support for democrats among young men of all types (especially strong among black/latino young men) is why democrats seem to be structurally unable to win over any kind of non traditional voting groups en mass.
Left leaning folks have also been sticking their head in the sand about the rapid evangalization/anti-catholic reaction that is sweeping through American latino communities right now. I am witnessing this both among personal friends and again and again in the news/sociological articles. Democrats are reacting to this by trying to move to the right on immigration. It's not working, and we are doomed as a result.
I broadly agree with the assessment, but I don't think there's an obvious solution. There is only so far the left-leaning half of this country is willing to compromise with the increasingly less-educated, hyper-masculine right side. And while the right side may (barely) have the numbers to stay politically competitive, it's also the side rapidly losing out in terms of education, wealth and status. Backlashes can stall the broader trends, but they generally don't reverse them.
They could start by trying anything at all. For instance, addressing the issue of homeless veterans is far more important than prostrating themselves to trans special interest groups.
The modern american conservative movement is becoming decoupled from the practice of evangelical christianity (which is the origin of republican teetotaling) even as it becomes more closely aligned with its policy goals. So I'm not sure I'd expect to see this connection hold with young conservatives. It might though, but I can't find anything reputable looking at it directly.
Maybe, But still incredibly cheap for a teen looking to drunk. 1.75 Liters of vodka is $8.99 at the corner store. That will get 20 kids puking drunk for the price of a hamburger.
a) your data is only till 2011 and misses some extreme inflation in the past 10 years.
b) we're talking youth - who are nowadays also less likely to be manning the fast food counters - I remember working at 14 years old and now in many states that's not permitted until 16. So even less disposable income.
Teen Alcohol use has gone down ~50% over the last 30 years, and but there has been no legalization effort there. Similarly, teen sex rate has also gone down ~50% over the same time period.
Overall, abstention from behaviors seems to be a major trend. I would be curious to know if this is due to a cultural aversion to perceived risky behaviors, lack of autonomy, or some other factor like rate of behavior modification medicine.