Why do millenials act this way, and how can it be fixed, or at least exploited for financial gain?

My question regards psychological science rather than hard science.

If you are a millenial, perhaps you have noticed that other millenials, and perhaps even yourself, for some reason identify as having at least one kind of mental illness - depression being the most prevalent, and anxiety following afterward. Millennials spend a lot of their time on social media. If you study what it is exactly that these millennials from middle-upper class families all have in common when it comes to favoriting and sharing posts on social media, you will quickly notice that they are self-deprecating in nature.

Millenials also find themselves abusing drugs and alcohol from a young age, often cracking jokes about their alcohol use (referring to themselves "lol i'm an alcoholic"), vehemently defending their usage of cannabis, and now usage rates for the most pain-numbing drug of all, heroin, is the highest it's ever been. And it is consistently linked with young people.

I am 18 years old and have noticed this going on all around me. I go to college for electrical engineering, and even in my honors engineering dorm the overwhelming majority of students (literally 95%) get disgustingly drunk a minimum of once a week, and get high (marijuana) a minimum of twice a week. I will be candid with you and admit I have fallen into these vices as well.

You will also find millenials are OBSESSED with sex, maybe moreso than humans have ever been obsessed with sex before. Promiscuity in both women and men has risen greatly, with hordes of millenials numbing themselves incoherently before stumbling their way into a nightclub/bar in the hopes of finding some kind of fairytale partner that will sweep them off their feet and make them feel loved, valuable, and important. This frequently ends in one night stands, as sex is still regarded as the ultimate act of love. But the millenial will find himself/herself unfulfilled after the one night stand, and will repeat the process the next weekend.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun#Mouse_experiments
waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-unhappy.html
twitter.com/AnonBabble

>millenials...identify as having at least one kind of mental illness - depression being the most prevalent
>you will quickly notice that they are self-deprecating in nature.
>Millenials also find themselves abusing drugs and alcohol from a young age, often cracking jokes about their alcohol use
>Promiscuity in both women and men has risen greatly

Maybe it's all connected.

Also you sound autistic as fuck.

Depression largely stems from anxiety, AKA concern about your future. Given dwindling job prospects, rising costs, and decreasing wages, what the fuck do you expect? The best millenials can hope for is a tiny apartment they can live by themselves in while they're not working 12 hours a day doing shitty jobs to make ends meet.

Capitalistic consumerism (and subsequent impacts)

Or else the lack of similarity between the conditions we adapted to over our evolutionary history and the modern inundation of knowledge and restricted time to integrate it.

eh, probably autistic. Can't help it I guess.

And yes it's all connected, clearly, but I want to know the underlying cause of it all. They feel depressed and unfulfilled because they have shallow sex and get fucked up all the time, and they have shallow sex and get fucked up all the time because they feel depressed and unfulfilled.

But how did this cycle start, and why?

...

You think it's due to the world being harder to survive in then ever before?

I mean even during the Great Depression, people were working long hours so their family could eat. These days, people without enough money to eat are apparently shooting black tar into their veins instead of getting a job.

interesting. So you think society has advanced too quickly for humans to adapt? And as a result, the society forming has become highly primal and self-indulgent in nature?

When i found myself getting intoxicated all the time it was because it was the only time i was in control of myself. Job and education is forced because if you dint do it, your homeless, and anyone who was graced with job\education they wanted to do looks down on you.

These kids are being obligated to live life by another influence, and when they escape that influence they immediately dose themselves with something to disable the brain parts that deal with the obligation.

Lol can tell i drank in highschool by my post structure. How about that too, if you miss a step, your contently refunded you missed a step.

Something happened in the 90s where none of the kids learned you have to make your own money until they were like 13. You can adjust do logic by then so you're able to add up that it will never add up.

>and why?
They're, we are, young in a world where they have vanishingly few prospects. As it turns out the one of the few things any of us can do nowadays is get completely shit faced, and then engage in meaningless, pointless sex to try desperately and vainly to make some connection with another person, as if to give themselves some meaning.

Having to figure out what sex is completely on your own, most of them not even knowing what they're doing just rubbing sensitive organs together while confused about what they do

It's a mystery they never solve. Go play with some of your baby toys, you'll get the same overdrive to figure it out just cause it was such a big puzzle at one point in your life

>So you think society has advanced too quickly for humans to adapt?

More so that society has changed, resulting in dysevolution because of evolutionary mismatch (and that we're largely unaware of it).

Live is a reaction by definition. We can only react to something and behave accordingly. When there is nothing to react, humans can't behave.
Starvation, sexual deprivation, fear. People lack of all of this common stimulus. And became apathetic.
So they need to invent a new class of problems.

The people living through the great depression killed themselves, the people who were born during the great depression are the ones that adapted to knitting blankets or if the strings that came off the meat you bought.

Melenials would be the kids born in cushy warm beds with Capri sun and Saturday morning cartoons, and their first apartments don't have heat.

One weird for that is "spoiled" but when the person who is spoiled is honestly confused, you get a melenial

>study chem/pharm
>make anti depression pills
>sell to millennial cucks
>????
>profit

>born in 1997/1998
>not a millennial

It could be partly due to increased connectedness between people. Through social media, people can so easily compare themselves with so many people. Of course, people don’t want to look bad, so they end up making propaganda for themselves. This makes others feel bad about themselves, so they try to look even better. It’s a vicious circle in which everybody feels like an impostor. Everybody loses.

I think you will find that from previous generations people still suffered depression - people coming back from war were heavily depressed (used to be known as shellshock). However today, as compared to the past, it was never diagnosed or discussed as it is now. I think this is why we see depression and anxiety being more prevalent, and I agree with other anons as work is much harder to find now as a millenial - literally you could have no education at all and still find a good job to support yourself and a family.

As for drinking, people from previous generations got insanely drunk as well. I don't know if you know what the 6 oclock swill is but if you don't, look it up. Alcohol abuse was just as prevalent as it is today.

Drugs, again, something which was abused. Media blows it all up today though and this is the same with the sex craze we see.

There is a lot more to this whole argument than 'err fucking millenials' (take this with a grain of salt though as I'm also a millenial {and studying elec eng as well!})

It's called degeneracy.

Bingo.

This is the right one.
People need outside stimulus. If they have none they'll make it themselves.
I also think it's interesting how strife brings people to new heights, and without it we crumble.

Critical Theory.

Life has got too soft. There was an experiment with mice once that has some disturbing parallels with millennials.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun#Mouse_experiments

Happyness=Reality-Expectations.

waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-unhappy.html

>Gets called autistic
>Is so autistic that takes it as a compliment

>tfw I genuinely suffer from anxiety and depression but I'm embarrassed to admit it because of this.

>embarrassed
don't you mean anxious
:^)

>im so anxious and depressed and noone knows how special and sad and uncomfortable i am :)))
Back to tumblr so we can discuss why you people are such whiney cunts please.

People have been acting this way forever because people are attention whores.

Look at all the older people that are flocking to celiac disease and alternative medicine. That by itself is far more damaging than people wanting to get laid.

Millenial is somewhat vageuly defined but the consensus is that anyone under 36 years old is a millenial. Imo the most cringeworthy group are those that are not only clearly autistic but have convinced themselves that they are somehow better than all of their peers. I'm glad that on Veeky Forums we've established containment boards for those dipshits over on /pol/ and /r9k/.

They are as depressed as anyone else in the world, it's just that since they've had comfy upbringings they have a larger gap between being happy and sad so they think they're more depressed than everyone else. This is the reason all of them think they have depression.
The reason they act in the annoying way they do is because they want to act like they're the most mentally disabled person in there friend group for... well i'm not sure, It doesn't sesm like attention seeking its more like they want to be coddled and cared for without people thinking they're retarded, which is why they'll indentify as having trendy mental illnesses like depression, anxiety, skitzophrenia, and not autism or retardation or something.

What?
I just stated that I'm embarrassed to admit it because of people like them. Doesn't that imply that I'm not a whiney cunt, considering how I don't admit my issues in the first place?

the reason this happens is something something K/r selection

Victimhood is a hell of a drug

...

Nothing has changed OP, the technology has changed by humans have not. Ancients abused alcohol and drugs, and sex was rife.

because they had extremely easy lives, no bullying, no parent slapping, nothing. they never learned about reality until they actually lived in it

>Great Depression
>working

not both

no way,
/pol/ is here, alive and well.
stroke your ladycock in a different direction please.

>muh meme mice experiment
Fuck off. You know fairly well that a bunch of mice packed together in a small space is not analogous to the bulk of human society.
Social psychology is a sham.

>If you are a millennial, perhaps you have noticed that other millennials, and perhaps even yourself, for some reason identify as having at least one kind of mental illness.

No one I know does that, maybe you just know the wrong people. I have also never met anyone that defended their marijuana use with more than a simple 'it's fun'. Maybe these are just cultural differences.
If you are basing your findings on people who are very active on social media, then it is self-explanatory. It is pretty much a given someone is going to have some repulsive facet if they need to substitute their normal social life by an online one. They are also going to be young because most people who use the internet are young. What you then are experiencing is mere selection bias.


>Millennials also find themselves abusing drugs and alcohol from a young age, often cracking jokes about their alcohol use (referring to themselves "lol i'm an alcoholic"),


I have seen this for myself as well, I believe on of the reasons for this drug use is because a lot of young people, especially those without a lot of experience with other people, compensate for this lack of stimulation with tv and internet, where everything is exciting and grand. This makes the real world seem very unbearable, with its responsibilities and meager immediate rewards, and they need drugs to make it seem interesting again. Or at least lessen/alter the experiencing of it enough to make it bearable. This ironically causes a negative feedback loop which causes the normal world without drugs to seem even more unbearable.
however, while I do not know anything about heroin usage so I will refrain from commenting on that, but alcohol use from a young age used to be very common in European(-descended) countries. It is with reason that only very recently (last 100 years) have drinking laws been established/sharpened.

cont.

>If you study what it is exactly that these millennials from middle-upper class families all have in common when it comes to favoriting and sharing posts on social media, you will quickly notice that they are self-deprecating in nature.

Perhaps the self deprecative humour has to exactly to do with the fact that modern generations have had quite sheltered upbringings. Maybe a lack of experience with the harsh outside world has left them with too little confidence in their abilities to handle difficult or dangerous situations. They feel they have no agency in this world.
All the jokes in the image you posted are of a variety wherein the person finds themselves in a situation where they are incapable of altering the outcome. They post these jokes because they want confirmation for their inability to control it. Even the joke you posted 'lol i'm an alcoholic.' reinforces this victim mentality as it were; they are incapable of overcoming their alcohol use so they are an alcoholic.
Of course these generalisations are not indicative for all millennials as they are far too big a group to compartmentalise into 1 category, they're mostly of the loners of caring parents who remain couchlocked without ambitions above survival.
My solution would be to move these people into an environment where their normal distractions are taken away and where they are given agency in situations that are important (to them).

>Internet is flooded with vids/pic's of perfect successful people
>Most people are failures
>I could have been successful if not for my imaginary mental illness

>You will also find millenials are OBSESSED with sex
You will never find a generation not obsessed with sex. Ever.

Yeah, because people werent depressed during the Great depression
People worked happily everyday without any anx

With the job part, it has to do with flexibility. It is way harder to get a fulltime job, so the only solution for many young people is to get 2-3 part time jobs at the same time and somehow work 8 hours per day. And yes this is stressfull since you with a high probability will hate atleast 1 of these jobs
So no, things are not easier today, even if we dont have to ''struggle'' for our lives. My opinion atleast, no scientific backing

>millenials are OBSESSED with sex
>Millenials also find themselves abusing drugs and alcohol from a young age
>hopes of finding some kind of fairytale partner that will sweep them off their feet and make them feel loved, valuable, and important.

How weird. It's almost like they're young people or something.