Sorry, I'll retract some of what I said. There are some rough spots (affect vs. effect, phrasing, ranting, etc.), but this caught my mind's eye: I think we're starting to see what a huge influx of devalued college degrees and student loan debt is going to do to the young collective psyche. Ho boy.My private school and private college education was the deviation from the norm. My chances were better than the majority of people my age. Yet here I was stone broke. All I owned (and still own) is my college debt. So it wasn’t a surprise there were a teeming mass of people out there who knew with fatalistic certainty that there was no way out. Why not then retreat into your parents’ basements? And instead of despairing over trying and failing, celebrate not-trying? Celebrate retreating into the fantasy worlds of the computer. Steer into the skid — Pepe style. Own it. And why wouldn’t they retreat to a place like 4chan? To let their resentment and failures curdle into something solid?
Study finds young men are playing video games instead of getting jobs Thing is? Inside the confines of video games, there are achievements and social class. It's when the dissatisfied shift to another gamified environment (CoughREDDIT) that they start getting points and achievements for MAGA. They aren't being drafted to fight in 'nam but they've got it pretty shitty. It's when they gather anonymously to try and shock each other into an ever-lower value system that things go pear-shaped."Happiness has gone up for this group, despite employment percentages having fallen, and the percentage living with parents going up. And that's different than for any other group," says the University of Chicago's Erik Hurst, an economist at the Booth School of Business who helped lead the research.