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Oct 31Liked by John Della Volpe

I’m really glad to read this. I teach mainly introductory level philosophy classes at a large, public university in Southern California, and I am heartbroken by the desperation I witness in these young people. I am teaching about the youth mental health crisis, and it seems like all the splashy headlines, interviews, and books center on smartphones and social media. I’m beyond tired, as are my students, of being told that they just need to get off of TikTok and Insta. Jean Twenge and Jon Haidt say (paraphrasing here) “It can’t be the economy, because it came roaring back after 2008 and millennials weren’t killing themselves en masse.” Peter Gray (over at Play Makes Us Human here on Substack) says to look at what young people themselves say: school and achievement pressure have been cranked to 11 ever since No Child Left Behind and Common Core, and then these kids have experienced the most dramatic cost increases of housing, healthcare, and education of any generation ever. My students all nod furiously at this and say, “Yeah, that’s it!” They are right to feel desperate, and they are right to mistrust the experts and media parrots who keep telling them to just put their phones away at school. All this is to say, thanks for sharing the very real and relevant insights of this focus group. They jibe exactly with my experience of ~19 year old public university students.

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Really appreciate these insight, Justin. Thank you for reading.

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