re: We are all addicts: Today's Youth Are Depressed, Here's Why...

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Yeah, I think it's some combo of rx addiction, staring at screens all day, not enough physical exercise, crap job market, etc.

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I suspect the following forces are at work:

1) Our brains are evolved for manual labor. For most of recorded history, we hunted or farmed. Even in the industrial age we still worked with our hands. A white collar economy is a recent phenomenon.

2) Smaller families. Boomers commonly had multiple brothers and sisters. Now a lot more people are only children or have just one sibling. After a couple generations, people also have a lot fewer cousins. That makes our social networks smaller and more transient. Not good when you're a social species.

3) People are increasingly likely to move away from home as adults. I saw once that a majority of Americans now live more than 50 miles from where they were raised. Fits in with #2 (smaller, more transient social networks).