Summary
Teen drug, alcohol, and tobacco use in the U.S. continues to decline, with record-low usage levels reported in 2023, according to the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future survey.
Among 12th graders, 66% reported no recent use of alcohol, marijuana, cigarettes, or e-cigarettes, while 80% of 10th graders and 90% of 8th graders avoided these substances entirely.
Experts attribute the decline partly to reduced peer pressure during the pandemic.
However, nicotine pouch use has doubled among 12th graders, raising concerns.
Despite pop culture’s glamorization of smoking, teen cigarette use remains low.
People are also more poor in general.
Wages have been stagnating for over 50 years.
Independence requires financial independence.
It’s not possible to meaningfully participate in society without disposable income.
This leads to the avg person having less power and influence than almost any of their ancestors.
Unfortunately nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
Video games are fundamentally experiences of agency, of being in some kind of environment that is dynamic, spontaneous and in conversation with the player.
Modern life on the other hand is fundamentally the experience of having no agency and being in a car choked landscape where nothing is dynamic, spontaneous or in conversation with you (especially as pedestrian when not driving).
I am goind to spend time where I have agency, where the landscape was designed in joyous anticipation of someone like me existing in it, the real life human spaces around me have been exhaustively rectified to the brutality and logic of latestage capitalism and thus these “real” landscapes around me are dead.
Society seems to every day increasingly hate and punish people who want to explore, play and create. Why the fuck would I want to spend time in real life spaces when they were designed out of a specific hatred for the kind of thing that makes me feel happy, alive and welcome?
Playing video games is something I do because I am poor AND because I gravitate towards landscapes and communities that were designed by people who don’t hate my brain and the way I think and live.
I can barely afford to drink in my basement!
But the point is you do it. Keep up the good fight!
I mean if you didn’t had disposable income, drugs were the last of your worries in that scenario
you’d wish, but the thing with drugs is “you” (the drugs in you) wanna continue even in poverty and homelessness