Nothin gainst you op, but i fucking hate this shit.

First off: Bettridge's Law of Headlines means the article won't answer the question which always malds the fuck out of me. I can feel my hair itchin already.

Second:

small shifts in beliefs and behaviors that could help.

Here we go with the victim blaming again. These articles are always the same:

It's not our soul crushing society that's to blame, dear smart and mature reader; that's ludicrous. Let us adults discuss the young people and how they need an attitude adjustment to better fit this world as we, the mature, have done. Let's talk to some "experts", as if we couldn't just interview gen Z directly! (Cant trust kiddos to know what's best for them)

But maybe I'm wrong! Time to dive in and see.

the decline in young adult well-being has coincided with two large trends. The first is a rise in economic inequality, which has left millions of young people in a state of ~~relative~~ precarity.

Well, no shit. not having money to go out and blow off steam makes life a sad and empty thing. Glad the article is gonna talk bout real shit! Maybe i was wrong! Let's keep reading!

The second is a media ecosystem—both social and legacy—that inundates us with negative information.

Oh. Oh no. This is the actual focus huh? Tell young people to ignore a "media ecosystem" of "negative information"? Uh, excuse me while I

There's a lot of real scary shit out there homie, shit happening right now, and you want them/us to just... ignore it? This ass is actually implying we're imagining things are worse than they are? Telling young people and the reader to put blinders on? Go out n have some fun?

This article boils down to a meme

Fuck off Skinner

In the past, happiness across the adult lifespan took on a “U-shaped” curve. Young adults were among the most content with their lives, happiness dipped in middle age and then rose again among older adults. In recent years, this decades-old curve has shifted into a straight, upward line. Older adults remain happy, and middle age remains middling, but young adults are now less happy than either group.

Yeah, we know why. Decades of reduced social investment at the behest of a incredibly large and selfish cohort that is remaining in power far longer than any generation before them.

The article says people underestimate how warm and friendly others are and to join communities. At this point it's my life, I expect about a third of the people I meet to be complete pieces of shit with an additional third to be people I'm just not interested in being social with. Being part of a community does not change those odds. I've been part of one with in person interaction for 20+ years and there are people with repugnant ideas (transphobia, antimask, etc) I have to tolerate to participate. There's a reason we have the phrase "missing stair". I started a whisper network in a different community I'm in because nobody, including the victim, is willing to make waves by ejecting a guy that sexually assaulted a member of the community, even people that claim to be feminists. Separating wheat from chaff is exhausting and I wish I knew how to tip the odds into the task being actually rewarding. Even if you find people that you jive with, you have to constantly be working to replace the people that disappear for whatever reason, moving, children, job schedule, divorces, and plain old being dead. I've not given up on people or being social, it's just takes so much effort that I really get people checking out of it.

I'm one of the people who have helped set up a community for skaters/longboarders in my city which has seen a great regular base of people coming back weekly. The ages vary from all spans. Do you want to know what I've found the key to be?

A) The meetups have to be accessible to the group, meaning something which doesn't require people to pay for. People can't afford anything right now, especially the younger people. Having somewhere public to go and hang out together and skate is a huge benefit. The costing leads us into the second more important step;

B) community willing to gift old gear to new riders. If people come join our community, there is often someone available with an extra board they don't use as much and are happy to gift to new riders who seem interested in following meets. Finally, and actually the most challenging;

C) making sure to limit political discussions. People in our group of over 40 people obviously have a wide swath of beliefs, and if anyone gets discriminatory, we shut that shit down and explain to those people that the group is inclusive and has no interest in those discussions here. We always have the risk of members clashing, but with a larger group we've found over the past couple of years we're able to at least shut that stuff down sooner, since the majority of people involved just want others to skate with and make friends with for their hobbies, and less so their beliefs.

All of this to say the most important part is free third places. If people don't have places they can go together that doesn't empty their wallets, then yeah, people are going to stop going out and will stay inside instead. It's another failing from the generations that have come before closing down more public spaces and trying to monetize everything, including government services.

The problem for me is that there is no community. There is so very few people who care about the things I care about. I'm lucky enough to have most of my friends from highschool which keeps me sane.

There isn't even really community options online. Discord is full of children, matrix is empty, mastodon is empty, I dont use Facebook or insta. Lemmy, obscure image boards and forms are the only comfy places ive found. Most of the people I vibe with a Europeans which is terrible because they live on the complete opposite side of the world.

Young people are struggling with mental health and relationships, but there are small shifts in beliefs and behaviors that could help.

Gotta disagree here. They always sell the "quick fix", but the reality is that changing your beliefs about the world is no small thing.

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

Marx spoke of the alienation of products and labor, but Debord spoke of the alienation of communications.

In essence, our mass communications systems have effectively become products, and inasmuch, they also function of tools of alienation. There are no more community-owned and operated communications. The community-driven barbed wire telephone systems are long dead.

Even if you use a more "open" system such as Matrix, you're still generally doing it on someone else's private property. Even if the instance owner is very open, communicative, and desiring of a flat structure, they cannot change the fact that the structure is designed as hierarchy at it's core. The internal hierarchy of computing is part and parcel to the problem, we do not build machines that operate on consensus, they all operate on the hierarchy of owner > admin > moderator > user. As such these systems build social alienation because there is no ability to build community consensus with these tools.

We have allowed the power of communications to be usurped by private groups for controlling ends, and we wonder why it is so hard to find social connection.

The article is not wrong, the best way to find social connection is in the meatspace, but as @zero_spelled_with_an_ecks@programming.dev astutely points out (at least in the USA) a good third or more of people that you meet in meatspace are absolute an absolute travesty of a human being. This leads to further isolation as you don't know who is socially "safe" to be open with, as you could be communicating with a fascist who will intend to harm you for your beliefs and ideology.