you're sad because you know too much

My friend @gruelight on Tumblr recently posed an open question: why are people these days, especially the young ones, so sad? Is it that the problems of today are somehow worse than the problems of all generations past? Are there just no good things to talk about, because "having enough to eat" is boring and doesn't count? Is it just that hard to get off the hedonic treadmill?

To be frank, I'm not sure that I'm convinced that people these days are actually that much sadder than before. Sadness is a nebulous thing that seems difficult to measure. But anecdotally, I observe a defeatist vibe among young people like me, which presents itself in various flavors of "what's the point?". A sort of Gen Z generational ennui, if you will. This is what I'll be referring to as "sadness" for the rest of the post.

My theory is this: we Zoomers are sad because we know too much. We know too much about the things we cannot control, causing us to buckle under the weight of the resulting futility. But we are also used to knowing too much about our everyday problems, leaving us with the assumption that everything should be easily knowable, easily solveable. It leaves us with epistemic immune systems as weak as those of newborns, an insatiable hunger for assurance paired with paralyzing inaction stemming from the illusion of control.

As a result, we're inexperienced at handling uncertainty and bad at trusting ourselves with anything meaningful.

That's what's making us all so sad.

you know too much about problems you cannot possibly hope to solve

First things first: the world has problems, and sometimes this makes people sad (citation needed). This is one of @gruelight's hypotheses:

We are sad about the world’s problems and the impossibility of solving them and how those problems intersect with our own lives. We are sad about one of sixty-three potentially world-ending events.

I don't disagree that there are real, existential-risk-level problems that intersect with our lives. And I am worried about them; it would be weird if the potential extinction of humanity didn't concern me at all.  

But I think the sadness is less about the scale of the problems, and more about the degree to which we are aware of them. I can't pretend that my life is worse than that of my ancestors. My grandparents lived through a war; my parents worried about having enough to eat. But because of the Internet, I know way more about the ways the world is bad, and I know it in excruciating detail. In particular, I have access to far more information about how the world being bad might affect my own life — a faraway natural disaster might cause my groceries to jump in price, whatever the tech oligarchs are doing might affect my job prospects. It looks like my world is worse than what came before, because things we used to treat like the weather we now treat like attacks on our person.

But this information is rarely actionable, and even if you could turn up the agency dial and do something about it, the sheer volume of it means that there is no way all of it could be actionable at the same time. You cannot, as one person, solve all of crime and also cancel culture and also poverty and also institutional breakdown and also misinformation and also war all at the same time. At some point, reading about all the sad things just exposes you to a huge volume of problems that your brain correctly computes are unsolveable, and now what? You just know about a bunch of problems you can't do anything about anyway.

It's bad enough that those problems are taking up precious space in your brain, but worse, they're making you underestimate how much impact you can have on your own life. It's not a bad assumption from your lizard brain — a greater proportion of the problems you're feeding it are problems you can't do anything about. If you keep hearing about how the job market is burning to the ground, or how the LLMs are taking all the jobs, or how discrimination makes it harder for people like you to get a job, then of course applying for a job seems worthless. It's easy to forget that applying for jobs is a Thing You Can Do to undeniably increase your odds of landing a job, because you're pitting yourself against the happenings of the whole wide world.

This is not to say that abstract, humanity-level problems shouldn't be solved, or that thinking about these problems is inherently depressing. When there's meaningful work to be done, these kind of big problems can give people a sense of purpose, instead of pushing people into the depths of learned helplessness.

The most salient example to me is the AI safety camp, which is not full of people who are sad in the Zoomer doomerism sense, despite the fact that 99% of the news is of the form "guys, we are even more screwed than before". I think this is the case because the messaging in AI Safety Land, while certainly doom-oriented, is also hugely centered around what can and should be done, and what anyone at any level can do to contribute to the cause. The focus on actionable items innoculates the community against Zoomer-coded "we're all going to die anyway, what's the point?" vibes, because it reminds people that they can do things to make some kind of difference.

You need to focus on what you can do about things, or you're going to lose your mind.

[to be continued...]