I lived my teen years in a collapsing post-communist economy, with hyperinflation (the kind that can add 4 zeros to prices in a span of a few years), massive unemployment and deep real-wage reduction. My mother struggled with a minimum wage that translated to about 80 dollars and two children, well bellow the absolute poverty line, and my father was mostly absent. In my high school and first year at the university, there were frequent days were I had almost nothing to eat at home and most days I had no cash at all, not even to buy a bread roll or pay for some copies of lecture material - so I copied them by hand. Wore the same clothes for years, passed down from my elder brother.

To put it in perspective, the political polarization around me was leading people to violence orders of magnitude larger than the events of January 6, with multiple governments toppled by angry crowds, inter-ethnic violence, workplace harassments of dissenters. Don't even start me on the state of the environment.

Yet, when I look back, my teen memories are not about poverty, hunger or political turbulence. That was just the way things were, we adapted. I had my ragtag crew in which I was accepted. We just didn't care about politics or the environment all that much.

The most vivid good or bad memories that I hold all have to do with social interaction, acceptance or rejection and public humiliation. We certainly didn't exhibit, as a generation, the signs of a mental disease epidemic, the fist time I heard about a suicide in my age cohort was of a fellow student in the later years at one of most competitive universities in the country.

Don't get me wrong, this economic enviroment devastated adults, and we had some of the highest levels of suicide and alcoholism in the world. But it just didn't affect us teens specifically, because we had no earlier reference to how things were supposed to be.

I think a lot of the problem is that folks who are actually in the situation do end up dealing with it better because they mostly don't have time to think about it.

The folks we're talking about are mostly on the precipice of something terrible happening, but they're still mostly secure enough to not be directly affected, but they definitely feel like it's coming right for em.

Maybe you would have felt the same if you were just a few years younger at the time? i dunno.

I actually agree. I’m not sure the political milieu is what is causing malaise.

But I take issue with describing the list above as pure media reality.

Thanks for posting your experience!

> political extremism becoming the norm —> It definitely increased on both sides

Recent generations have seen multiple political assassinations and bombings. When was the last time you saw a fire hose and dogs used to clear protestors?

Tribalism is on the rise, extremism and violence are not.

For example G20 in Hamburg, a couple of years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAtZThq2BLw.

But I don't think this is the kind of extremism they meant. There is a worrying trend, especially in the US, to try and block whatever the other side is doing, just because it's the other side that's doing it. People retreat into their filter bubbles and have increasingly less contact to real people with differing opinions. The divide between urban and rural opinions is steadily growing.

The testimony is citing a rise in self-harm and mood disorders in people aged 11-15 between 2009 and 2015. There was not yet a pandemic or inflation and houses were actually reasonably affordable for a while after the market crash. There actually was a recession in 1991 when I was 11, yet somehow I have no memory of being aware of that or ever thinking about it. This is the bigger point about media culpability. If 11 year-olds are really concerned about these things now, why is that? Seemingly, it might have something to do with the 24/7 algorithmic doom scroll feeds they're consuming that didn't exist in 1991. Typically, the starting point for when cooperation broke down and political polarization started dovetailing in the US are the Bork confirmation hearing and Newt Gingrich becoming speaker of the House, both of which happened when I was about these ages, yet again, I was not aware of it back then. The world has always had major issues, but these just were not things that concerned very many 11 year-olds until pretty recently.

>climate that will be unlivable in a few decades

These absurd scaremongering predictions do more harm for the climate change movement than good. If you’re over 30 you’ve already lived through this threats twice and it’s beginning to get tiresome. These exaggerated doomsday predictions just give ammunition to deniers because you never set them far enough in the future it’s always “just 20 more years guys…”

What do you think where those 200 million will flee to? Certainly not other arid or equatorial countries.

Now that's moving the goalposts from the notion that Americans should be worried that their own home will become inhospitable, and that it will happen to some other region. Remember, this document is about American teens.

And regardless, no, that shouldn't be cause for dread either. Those 200 million estimated refugees are spread out both geographically across the globe and across a century time-wise. There's 45 million immigrants living in the US currently. Even if half come to the US, it's hardly an apocalyptic levels of immigration.

I'm concerned because I remember what a relatively low number of refugees did to European politics over the last couple of years.

I am not sure of the causal relationship.

Did the refugees cause the politics, or were they used by politicians seeking a convenient non-voting Other they could demonise relatively safely?

I recognise my still-limited grasp of the German langue prevents me looking too closely at the politics of Germany, but I never had an impression since moving here that even a million caused significant real issues.