An understanding of the world at large is overwhelming versus remaining in a bubble.
I think caring what happens to the world at large is a pretty big emotional burden to carry.
So the takeaway is children who are taught to care about others are more depressed?
Makes sense given the world we’re in.
Yeah, I think that’s what it is. Take climate change for example. These days, even denier of climate change aren’t usually denying that it exists, but rather that humans are causing it, that we can do anything about it, or that it matters. For those deniers, climate change isn’t stressful or depressing at all. If anything, to them it’s just an annoyance that people are trying to get them to make changes.
But to people who don’t bury their head in the sand, climate change is terrifying. The idea that we’re making the world less hospitable to ourselves and our children is horrible enough, but it’s made worse by the fact that we could be taking action to reduce it… but don’t.
And then there’s dozens of similar issues besides climate change, like access to healthcare, LGBT rights, genocides occuring around the world, the growing wealth inequality, police violence, etc etc etc.
most relevant example of “ignorance is bliss”
I remember crying as a kid when I first understood this saying, it made me so mad to know that some people get to remain stupidly ignorant
I recall being pretty upset when I wrapped my head around that saying as a kid, too.
You all sound so humble. I was literal trash and asked “why must I be cursed to be such a geeeeeenius??!”
wat
Even explaining it sounds like a garbage humble brag — let me assure you I’m no genius. What I meant was, when I first understood “ignorance is bliss”, I was like “well, I’m particularly cursed because I am very smart”
Did you read my fucking journal?
We all have.
Could also be described as “Too thick to know how fucked you are”.
it’s really much more aggressive than that at this point… it actually is a game of “give the liberals all the worry” for them… or, act like a screaming child, and treat liberals like mommy…
Expecting mommy to fix everything while at the same time throwing endless tantrums making it harder if not impossible?
Yeah, that checks out.
I would say some of this depends on the reaction of the family and peers. If you are a child in a liberal family and said you need help with depression the chances of you getting help and it getting reported is much greater than if your are in a consecutive family.
I’m quite sure most liberal families are consecutive, too. :D
Parallel families are a thing, following a divorce where custody is shared for example. :)
I grew up very conservative with a very conservative father. I was severely depressed. My father straight up used to say that mental health issues were not real and believed therapy was bad thing. He once yelled at an allergist that prescribed me Zyrtec because he got it confused with Zoloft. 16 year old me would have killed myself before admitting to him or anyone else that I was thinking about suicide.
I’m much better now, on the whole, but sometimes I do wonder how I managed to get through my teen years alive. I think I honestly was just stubborn. My father takes a much more relaxed view of mental health now, and had even offered to go to therapy with my mother before he filed for divorce (she was worse than him and refused to see a therapist even to save their marriage). But yeah, teens in conservative households are going to toe the line for what they are taught. Even if they know there’s something wrong they aren’t going to ask for help for their parents if they feel their parents reaction will be negative. This was my lived experience anyway.
Happy to report I’m a raging liberal now and my father and I don’t discuss politics in order to maintain our familial relationship. Occasionally I’ll trick him into agreeing with a principal that conservatives say they support and then bring up some legislation from the GOP that directly contradicts that principal. I don’t press it though and he doesn’t seem to absorb it much, but that’s just how it is for people convinced the GOP are the good guys.
I am glad you made it and are doing well.
Ignorance is bliss
Yeah, well when you’re so delusional you think climate change doesn’t exist, 10 year old rape victims should be forced to give birth and LGBTQ people who are oppressed deserve it, you’re less unhappy about the state of the country.
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What?
Other studies have shown that conservatives are also much more ignorant than liberals. By the transitive properties, this is just confirmation that “ignorance is bliss.”
It’s easier to he happy when you don’t know how fucked up the world is.
Blessed is the mind too small for doubt!
Hey maybe it’s because it’s really fucking depressing to watch a bunch of reactionary theocratic nationalist racist imbeciles rig our voting systems so it’s impossible for them to not win and then constantly read stories about how those same imbeciles are doing catastrophic amounts of damage to so many things in so many ways that it would be difficult to name them all?
I mean, conservatives go out of their way to know as little as possible, feel as little as possible, and help others as little as possible. It doesn’t surprise me that the group of people who think intelligence is weakness, also don’t have strong moral compasses or compassion for anyone else.
If intelligence is indeed strength, how the fuck did the smart-ass liberals fail to overpower the conservatives? Real liberals are way less intelligent than what we would like to believe.
I’m guessing you’re talking about US politics, where politicians are largely owned by the wealthy.
It’s pretty easy: Democrats are the good cops, Republicans are the bad cops. One takes away your rights while the other goes through the motions of fighting for them but, as a whole, they’re both “cops”. They’re on the same team, largely serving the rich.
Ask a rape victim if knowing you are being raped gives you the strength to stop being raped.
So… hysterical and stubborn, unempathetic ignorance is bliss. Until it isn’t. Which is to say - until whatever toxic regressive bullshit they have entrenched themselves upon affects them directly.
Eh, I grew up conservative and I started swinging in high school (then admitted it to myself in college) mostly over gay rights, which were becoming more and more front and center debate at the time. At the time I would have said I was 100% straight and 100% woman, but I had gay friends and I wanted them to have all the things I could have. It was my first ideological break.
Sometimes it you, sometimes it’s the people you care about which get affected. While it might be true that people with low empathy might have to be directly effected, the reality is that for most people it will be simply gaining an affected friend. This is why college makes you liberal, by the way. It’s not the teachings, it’s the fact that you spend time rubbing elbows with real people who turn out to be nothing like the caricatures you were told they would be.
My ex-husband’s kid did the same thing. When they were in elementary school, they told me we should hate a celebrity because they’re gay (obviously parroted from their born-again mom and creepy youth pastor stepdad). Then in middle school, they made a gay friend and their mom threatened to make them change schools, and I think that was one of the first big wtf moments where their lived experiences really clashed with what they were told at home. It kept happening as they made more diverse friends and figured out most of us are just trying to live our lives in peace, not eat babies on the weekends at our interracial sodomy parties or whatever.
Now they’re a young non-binary adult who is full on pro LGBTQ+ rights, pro-choice, anti-racist, etc. I’m sure their mom blames their dad, but all he really ever did was be supportive and clear that in his house, bigotry wouldn’t be tolerated.
Maybe because they’re not delusional about the state of the world we live in that these right wing nut jobs seem to be hell-bent on making worse until we’re all living in a post-apocalyptic Gillead. I’m fucking depressed too.
scores increased for all adolescents after 2010, but increases were most pronounced for female liberal adolescents
Gee I wonder what could possibly be depressing the female liberal teens.
What a stupid study.
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The tiny differential (look at the actual numbers) between liberal/conservatives isn’t much of a story, but it makes for good clickbait and will help the researchers establish themselves in their discipline.
I think maybe the biggest takeaway from this article is that it points out that all seniors in high school have reported steadily increasing depression over the last thirteen years. I’m willing to bet this trend started earlier in the 2000s. And it’s right in line with more and more and more and more and more of all the available money ending up in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Everyone is more depressed.
I think it probably comes down to how you’re raised. Conservatives will tell their kids black and white things. Something is either good or bad whereas liberals will try to insert the very real nuance into things.
Kids need things to be black and white when they’re very young because they don’t have the mental capacity to handle a lot of nuance, so trying to teach it early will give them a negative outlook on the world even if it’s a realistic idea about things. Where conservative parents faulter is they never teach the nuance, so their kids spend a good chunk of their adult years thinking black and white which is obviously wrong even if they’re happier.
A good tactic is give a positive, black and white outlook on the world when kids are young and add complexity as they go.
Ex: tell a young kid that cops are good people to call when there’s an emergency. As they get older, and the very real atrocious things they do appear on the news, you keep adding to the truth, so when they’re grown, and if they’re a POC like my son, they learn to be wary of cops, but still can 911 in an emergency. That you don’t automatically assume ACAB, but you don’t have to trust them, know your rights, etc
I hope all that makes sense
Devils advocate here, psychology is hard and I don’t have a clue. What if the basis of black/white is more of an institutional thing (such as Santa’s naughty/good list, red vs blue) and less of a “what a child needs”? As in, do we really know for sure that’s how proper development is needed to curb some mental health concerns? If the spectrum of life is more laid out in the fundamentals of development would that really cause the result we are seeing here?
In conclusion, we found that worsening time trends in adolescent internalizing symptoms from approximately 2010 onward diverged by political beliefs and were most severe for female liberal adolescents without a parent with a college degree. (bold by me)
I would imagine (not raised as a female) that the stark contrast of “what” you’re suppose to be (in regards to relationship expectation perpetuated by peers and media - the study used 12th-grade students), with the sudden realization that you must also be a “working person” in a seemingly-crumbling society could be highly impactful. Typically Males can maintain the same course of progression, as from earlier stages of life their “status path” (what society deems acceptable) doesn’t vary as much.
That makes good sense to me. Thank you for sharing that example.
Yeah, having empathy will do that to a person.
🎶🎶🎶
It’s the terror of knowing what this world is about
Watching some good friends screaming, ‘Let me out’
