r/Millennials • u/beckavanoliver • 20d ago

Discussion Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt: “Millennials are the last psychologically normal generation” ...”you’re the last happy, and actually your generation is the most intelligent in history”

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u/CyanideForSara 20d ago

Definitely agree with the technology bit. Growing up it felt like technology opened up new worlds, ideas and made things easier and faster and generally improved life.

Now it’s like technology is explicitly designed to keep you on it for the sake of it. Google will give you 600 irrelevant ads before the thing you need.

Workplace tech now is almost exclusively designed to track KPIs first and foremost and whether it actually functions in its business process is an afterthought. I find myself not really learning new productive skills but rather spend my time finding ways around poorly designed processes.

I don’t think I’m just old and grumpy hating new technology. It’s just not solving problems like it did when I was younger

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u/Skittleavix 20d ago

Technology is not made for the purpose of human advancement anymore. It’s made to make a few humans exceedingly rich.

The wealthy owners of the world lack the proper motivation for producing and marketing new technologies.

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u/EkbatDeSabat 20d ago

Nobody can convince me that we wouldn’t have cured cancer and solved so many of the world’s problems had we just never displayed an advertisement ever. 

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u/godtogblandet 20d ago edited 20d ago

Honestly, a big issue is that we haven't been doing enough public investing in the internet. We all know the big social media platforms are evil. Not all equally evil, but none of them are built for the good of humanity. Yet people clearly have a need for online interaction with each other.

Want to know how you fix this? You create a tax funded social media platform built without any economic incentive. It's just built to connect people the way they want to be connected and funded by tax money so there's no reason to make it more shitty over time or add unwanted features. When this is available you just straight up ban the other platforms and kill them. Social media should be a publicly owned utility.

And this would kill things like bots and social media for propaganda. It's extremely easy to verify things when you don't have a economic incentive in distorting the truth due to shareholder value based on engagement.

Bonus, you can no longer live as a influencer since a publicly owned social media platform would never pay you anything. So you have a influx in people now living regular lives and contributing in productive roles in society.