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540 points drankl | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.222s | source
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parpfish ◴[] No.44485690[source]
Decades ago in my first abnormal psych course, the prof warned us that there was an almost iron-clad law that students will immediately start self diagnosing themselves with “weak” versions of every disorder we learn about. In my years since then, it has absolutely held true and now is supercharged by a whole industry of TikTok self-diagnoses.

But there are a few things we can learn from this:

- if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves that makes them feel unique, they’ll take it.

- if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves to give a name/form to a problem, they’ll take it.

- most mental disorders are an issue of degree and not something qualitatively different from a typical experience. People should use this to gain greater empathy for those who struggle.

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Aurornis ◴[] No.44485973[source]
> - if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves to give a name/form to a problem, they’ll take it.

This one is widespread among the young people I’ve worked with recently. It’s remarkable how I can identify the current TikTok self diagnosis trends without ever watching TikTok.

There’s a widespread belief that once you put a label on a problem, other people are not allowed to criticize you for it. Many young people lean into this and label everything as a defensive tactic.

A while ago, one of the trends was “time blindness”. People who were chronically late, missed meetings, or failed to manage their time would see TikToks about “time blindness” as if it was a medical condition, and self-diagnose as having that.

It was bizarre to suddenly have people missing scheduled events and then casually informing me that they had time blindness, as if that made it okay. Once they had a label for a condition, they felt like they had a license to escape accountability.

The most frustrating part was that the people who self-diagnosed as having “time blindness” universally got worse at being on time. Once they had transformed the personal problem into a labeled condition, they didn’t feel as obligated to do anything about it.

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BiteCode_dev ◴[] No.44487357[source]
I think after a few expressions of time blindness, they'll discover that their contracts have continuity deficiency and their career vertical expression challenges.

The feedback of reality will fix it, like for all young people.

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FirmwareBurner ◴[] No.44487762[source]
>The feedback of reality will fix it, like for all young people.

"A child who isn't disciplined at home, will be disciplined outside of the home" - old African proverb.

The issue is kids growing up without being taught accountability, but instead that they're perpetual victims of "the system" created by evil old white men, and therefore nothing they do is ever their fault. This is the fault of the parents, school system and society as a whole who coddles kids giving them the false sense of security that they can always have their way, right until they hit the brick wall of adulthood featuring employment, bills, debt, responsibilities and self sufficiency.

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1. dgb23 ◴[] No.44489697[source]
I've seen this kind of thing and it annoys me to no end. However that seems to be a small minority among many.

But the majority of young adults are rightfully asking hard questions.

Why should they suffer the consequences of political and corporate mismanagement ? Why is accountability rarely invoked when it comes to people in power? Why is it OK for old disgruntled people to yell at them for things they have nothing to do with? Why should they take us seriously if we don't take them seriously?

Again, I agree with you that some are hiding behind these things in order to deflect blame, but let's not pretend that the young don't have every right to be mad at us.

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2. FirmwareBurner ◴[] No.44490244[source]
>Why should they suffer the consequences of political and corporate mismanagement ?

Who said they should? Nobody should ideally, but that's the way the world works: shit rolls downhill. And being a cheeky little shit at work, will not result in a revolutionary change at the top of corporations leadership the way you imagine, but will just result in your direct manager's career being at risk due to your behavior, so you're giving him no choice but to cut you because they're not gonna die on your hill for you. Cultural changes take a long time and need to involve 90%+ of the workforce, not just a few.

>Why is accountability rarely invoked when it comes to people in power?

You know why. Because the rules are made by those in power, and people choose to rise to power in order to make the rules by which others are held accountable.

That's why young people are engaging in the "lying flat" or quiet quitting movements, and voting outsiders of the establishment like Trump, Mamdani, etc. They want to flip the monopoly board over because they know they were dealt a shit hand. And while I'm not that young anymore, I totally support their movement.

3. TeMPOraL ◴[] No.44492379[source]
> But the majority of young adults are rightfully asking hard questions.

As young adults always had, since the dawn of time.

And as they've received and comprehended the answers, most quickly stopped asking.

That is part of what becoming an adult, without the "young" bit, means. It's not like these things are unknowable, or that the "system of things" is secretive. It's all rather obvious - it just takes a little time and experience to figure out the questions and notice the answers.

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> Why should they suffer the consequences of political and corporate mismanagement?

Because that's how it works. It's not that different from asking, why should they suffer the consequences of a tree falling on them and crushing them? Because they happened to stand under it at the time, duh!

Society and civilization aren't fixtures created by nature/God - they're built out of human interactions. People pursuing all kinds of interests, alone or in groups, navigating around each other, cooperating, convincing or coercing each other. It's all abstract systems created and maintained by strangers. And the unfortunate reality is, someone screws up somewhere badly enough, everyone downstream of it suffers.

The sad irony is, the consequences they ask about come from mismanagement of systems that were created in the past to shield people from consequences of failure of earlier versions of the same or similar systems! That's what civilization is, in a way - stacking systemic solutions to problems of previous systems!

The silver lining is in hoping that every iteration makes less people suffer consequences and to a lesser degree.

> Why is accountability rarely invoked when it comes to people in power?

It is invoked much more often than they think, but they're not able to recognize it - it looks different than with people not in power. And it needs to be different, because the situation is different too.

> Why is it OK for old disgruntled people to yell at them for things they have nothing to do with?

Why is it OK for them to yell at old disgruntled people for things they have nothing to do with? Yelling is easy. Understanding that almost no one individually has much influence on how things are, that can unfortunately take a lifetime.

> Why should they take us seriously if we don't take them seriously?

Because that's how life works. It was the same for us when we were young, and for our parents when they were young, etc. Young people don't know shit about life, and don't even realize that yet. Over time, they acquire knowledge, experience and relationships, and various kinds of power - and along the way, they are treated more and more seriously, until they themselves become the people "running things" and start hearing the same questions they used to ask from the next generation of kids.

----

To be clear: I'm not saying that things are all ideal, or even perfectly fine. I'm just saying that the answers to those questions aren't mysterious, and figuring them out is exactly what growing up to be an adult in a society looks like. It always has, which is why you can see the exact same complaints about "kids these days" and "old farts" showing up in every period in history, all the way back to ancient Greece and earlier.

4. nradov ◴[] No.44495578[source]
Who is "us"? Youths are welcome to get as mad as they like but seething with impotent rage and posting hot takes on social media isn't going to get them anywhere. If they want to improve the world then first they'll have to work hard and pay their dues just like every other generation before them.

Or they could try to start a revolution, but frankly most of them are too weak and fragile to attempt anything that involves real sacrifice and risk.