Why are young people killing themselves more often?

‘Social media’ is too glib an answer.

I suggest a better one: anxious pseudoconnection replacing sometimes-fearful (but survivable) connection. Absent parents, and emotionally absent parents, totally unable to manage their own anxiety and having no system, no code, by which to organize such emotional management. Pseudofriendships carried out onscreen over the wires, simulating social connection but providing none of the sustenance of real copresence, codevelopment. No family around, no older people, no survivors to remind you that the world is survivable.

If you don’t have a support network you fall apart, and a ‘social network’ is not a support network, your coworkers at the company you intend to leave in a couple of years are not a support network, the students at the school you’ll soon pull your child out of in search of ‘better academic opportunity’ aren’t a support network.

Are they.

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