Facebook is a wrecking ball slamming into mental health
But, unrelated, here's a car driving video game you can't screw up
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The Surgeon General episode is finally here
I almost can’t talk much more about it in the newsletter since I’ve written about it at least twice already. But just to highlight: it’s a chat with Dr. Vivek Murthy about a new initiative that his office launched aimed at getting your workplace to suck less.
Essentially, it comes down to recognizing that workers are humans and that certain things need to happen for them to be able to thrive: protection from harm, connection & community, work-life harmony, opportunity for growth, and mattering at work. So the Surge-Gen (my nickname for him) (no one else’s nickname for him) is calling upon employers to do more because all of these things require some effort on the part of the boss.
Which makes me think, well, why would they? Companies are beholden to shareholders so why not just exploit the workers if it gets more money to those shareholders. That’s kind of their job. Surge-Gen says you can have both: if workers feel better, feel taken care of, feel valued, everything will improve. Productivity goes up, retention goes up, worker knowledge increases, and ultimately everyone will be better off.
Unfortunately, he cannot command all employers to be humane and forward-thinking. Many employers will continue to think of mental health as just a hassle or a ploy by workers to get more benefits. But hey, it’s a good step in the right direction.
I went to college
And I mean that in a variety of ways.
Yes, many years ago, I attended an institution of higher learning wherein I earned my bachelor of arts degree. It’s called a “bachelor’s” degree because you’re not married while you earn it and you live in a sad apartment with a low hygiene standard. You make omelets.
I also went to college in the sense that over the weekend, I returned to, yes, the very same college because it was family weekend and my daughter is now a student at the same place I went. And now, she won’t get a bachelorette degree because that would be sexist. Or something.
And of course I’m much older now and I have more in common with the professors than the students. In fact, two of the professors on the faculty at the college were classmates of mine when I was a student there. One lived three doors down from me in the freshman dorm, the other across campus.
When I was in college, it seemed like a swimming pool. It’s this big warm thing that you jump into with other people and you try to stay afloat. If possible, you have some fun playing games or sports of some kind. You know you’re not there forever but you don’t think about the finitude of time, you just splash around until it’s time to leave.
But what I’ve been observing since my kids started going off to college is how it’s much more like a river. My daughter, for instance, just started college in the fall of 2021 and is now a sophomore. She’s trying to figure out where she’ll live next fall, when she will already be more than halfway through the process. I think my professor pals must think of it this way, all the students being merely inner tube riders drifting by and heading for the rapids.
And it’s such a fast river, too. The students who are college seniors now are the only ones to have known a pre-covid college experience. They were in the spring of their freshman year when they were suddenly told to flee campus and nothing has been the same since.
Speaking of terrible things on college campuses
There’s new research on how terrible Facebook is for the mental health of the people who use it. The study looked at when Facebook was rolled out to various college campuses, what student mental health looked like before Facebook and how it looked after.
The key findings, which were confirmed after checking multiple assumptions, are that after Facebook was introduced to a campus, more students on that campus reported having depression and anxiety disorders. In particular, they were more likely to say they felt hopeless, exhausted, and “severely depressed.” When Facebook was introduced to a campus, more students were also reporting that mental health problems affected their academics. Further, the effect was strongest among students who were already most susceptible to mental illness. In other words, Facebook made college students already predisposed to depression or anxiety more likely to actually experience poor mental health.
As I talk about on the show this week with Surge-Gen, the current mental health crisis pre-dates covid. It is becoming increasingly clear to me that social media in general and Facebook/Instagram in particular are huge parts of the problem.
Here. You can drive. It might make you feel calm.
OR NOT AT ALL.
Slow Roads is a web-based game where you drive a car along a country road and nothing bad will happen to you. Oh you might go off the road, perhaps hear some banging when you hit the guard rail, but the car is never damaged and you suffer no ill consequences.
At one point, I went down the hillside, drove straight through trees and into the lake and everything was fine. I just drove back to the road again is all.
Born to be miiiiiiiild!
Hey I was on Science Friday!
Here’s a link: