CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance report highlights increased mental health crisis in teens | "They’re increasingly worried about things like climate change as well as violence that they experience in their schools"

It isn't a mental health crisis, it's a crisis of human identity, trapped inside a crumbling playhouse with roles to fill that dont make sense anymore, and we're not adapting but instead are pretending like there's something wrong with the kids. The kids are fine. The kids are responding to a state of emergency. It's the rest of us that are acting insane. Imagine a culture where wealth is how much you can carry on your head. It started off with a hat, which was so chic, so everyone did it. Then someone got two hats, so everyone else wanted two. Eventually, people would be stacking so much weight on their head their necks would be breaking. That's what's upsetting the children. They don't understand any of this or why it's even a good idea to stack bricks and crap on their heads, just because that's what we've been doing. Sure, it worked for a moment but this is out of control. There's people dying everywhere from just trying to survive in this insane hat culture. The older people don't get the problem because they were there when people started wearing hats. Their necks have had time to adapt to the weight. But the kids are being started with 50lbs and expected to add more every day. Not wanting any of this is not mental illness, rather it's the people who created the problem holding the power to definine mentally ill and "normal" i.e. most hats possible. This title might as well read "mental health crisis in teens over impending asteroid impact" or "counseling crisis: why isn't therapy working to make kids comfortable with doomsday?". You built a doomsday device and handed them a pair of pliers and said "dont worry, you'll figure it out... or you'll go extinct... now, here's your math lesson". It's never the children that are experiencing a mental health crisis. Children are wired to be resilient but they're also wired to be observant and live in reality. They can't NOT see their future burning down, and we're blinded by what this stupid hat wearing nonsense has given us... mostly an excess of hats. None of this is real. You are a real human being. Your flag and your team and your party and your car and all that crap isn't real. It needs to be constantly replaced to stop it from rotting in front of us. It's all pre-garbage. This is all an elaborate illusion of progress but cannot be progress because progress continues and can be handed down, it doesn't stop at a certain point and drop off suddenly. That's sabotage, not progress. This is one lifetime old and it's already changed the planet to make it inhospitable for life and filled with cancer and disease instead. One human lifetime of living the way we plan to continue, tomorrow. How do you do it? How do you pretend that you're not the problem? How do you dismiss the young people that don't want to go extinct because your way of life has changed the planet we live on? How are we not teaching them to do something else? How are we not doing that immediately? Why is any of this appealing? Im clearly not the only one that's fully fed up with pretending this is the right way to do things, but why are we still letting the people that built this sinking ship tell us what is and what isn't normal or ok to be upset about? "Climate anxiety" is the pathology of living in reality while trapped in a cultural delusion, which really messes with your head... because why would it ever be true that everyone else is acting crazy while you're sane? That's not how crazy works... wait... is that what "crazy" has always been? Realizing how stupid and pointless all this is? We're silencing legitimate critique by treating awareness as a disease state. I cannot articulate how much I hate being a part of this moment. We're all still chasing the money and not holding it accountable, and it's 40C in May in places it's never been 40C. The science has always been there, now the reality is becoming unavoidable, but somehow I still live in a world where the only meaningful way to spend your time is making the planet more alien. I cant even have this conversation irl. Not a single person I know will entertain the DISCUSSION that there might be more to being human than what we've been doing since 1970. Where is the courage to stand up and say "we are living wrong, unless murdering a planet is on your bucket list, and we need to knock it off, immediately!"? I see people talking about oil and driving to climate parades to hold up signs that might as well say "im protesting what i do with all of the rest of my time". Dont like climate change? Good! Me neither. Now, put down the gas can, as a start. Next, stop caring about tokens. We can't buy a new atmosphere! It's 2023. In the entire time we've known it was wrong to burn fossil fuels - like, radioactive waste level wrong - we have done exactly NOTHING to move away from them. There is no such thing as a "green" car, unless we're talking about a used bike. Roads are oil. Concrete is even worse. We are still waiting to start changing the way we live and it's been 40 fucking years at least. Ask anyone about climate change and they'll either deny it or say the right things and then get right back to what they were doing, like that isn't the problem. This is all the problem. The pace, the trajectory, the competition, it's a warmonger's wet dream. Why are we helping? Why are we committed to helping? Why, instead of being afraid of the institutions that have knowingly encouraged this, aren't we holding them accountable? Because we still believe in money as the most important thing. And the worst of us have the most of it so we let them do whatever they want, while putting people stealing for food, in prison. Maybe I died and this is hell. It's certainly my hell. I can talk about anything I want as long as it's not the one thing I feel compelled, as a human being, to discuss. If I want to feel companionship of any kind, I have to pretend the thing I want to change the most is the thing I most value. I cant find anyone who actually wants to live differently, im just waiting for a moment that will never come. My life is purgatory. I've been ready to work on this problem for 20 years, and was willing to wait 10. Now, I dont know what to do other than go back to being a part of the problem. Spend whatever months there are of this earth left, in some factory making the earth warmer rather than being outside, with other humans, accepting our fate together while trying to repair what little we can. You never expect to be the only person you can find to see something a certain way. I dont know what to do about that. It's incredibly painful.