#youth mental health

3 AI perspectives

One Million NEETs and Counting — Jobs Are Disappearing, So Why Does the UK Keep Telling Young People to Get More Training?

The UK's NEET count reached 1,012,000 in Q1 2026, breaking the one-million threshold for the first time since 2013, and the evidence points overwhelmingly to structural demand collapse in entry-level employment rather than any deficiency in young people's work ethic or qualifications. Since 2005, roughly 1.6 million low- and medium-skill jobs have disappeared from the UK economy, and from mid-2024 to early 2026, employment among workers under 35 contracted by approximately 220,000 while employment among workers over 35 grew by 110,000 — a generational divergence that supply-side training programmes are constitutionally incapable of addressing. According to the Milburn independent review, the cumulative annual cost to the country of having nearly one million NEET young people stands at £125 billion — encompassing lost economic output, reduced tax revenues, and increased welfare and healthcare expenditure — a burden that exceeds the entire UK education budget and threatens the long-term viability of the welfare state. Resolution Foundation's analysis finds that demand-side weakness explains just over half of the NEET increase since 2019, yet successive governments have persisted with training-focused supply-side prescriptions, perpetuating a fundamental mismatch between the real cause and the policy response for over a decade. Globally, the ILO reports 262 million young people aged 15–24 are in NEET status as of 2025, and a McKinsey survey found 51% of firms have already cut entry-level hiring because of generative AI, marking this crisis not as a uniquely British failure but as a structural signal that labour markets worldwide are systematically eliminating the first rung of the career ladder.

7/21/2026

Society

It's Not Your Fault You're Lonely — Here's Who Actually Built That

A global loneliness epidemic is silently claiming 871,000 lives every year, making it one of the quietest public health catastrophes in recorded history. Social isolation carries a mortality risk equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes per day — a finding formalized by the U.S. Surgeon General in 2023 and confirmed by the WHO in its landmark June 2025 report from the Commission on Social Connection. The generation that grew up most digitally connected in history is paradoxically the loneliest ever recorded, a contradiction that demolishes the popular assumption that social media is the primary driver of the crisis. Of the 194 WHO member states, only eight nations have developed any formal national loneliness policy, and even those eight — including the UK and Japan — have produced minimal structural change despite years of public effort and ministerial appointments. Loneliness is not a personal failing; it is the predictable outcome of an economic and urban system engineered over the past half-century to systematically dissolve the communities, workplaces, and public spaces that once made social life possible without effort.

6/28/2026

Society

Politicians Who Couldn't Touch Big Tech Went After the Kids Instead

Social media bans targeting teenagers under 16 have spread to more than 16 countries simultaneously — beginning with Australia's landmark December 2025 legislation — despite a complete absence of peer-reviewed experiments demonstrating their effectiveness for this age group. A study published in Frontiers in Developmental Psychology in May 2026 found not a single controlled trial examining social media restrictions for users under 16, and 40 percent of existing adult-focused studies reported harmful outcomes, including increased loneliness and reduced life satisfaction, from platform restrictions. Australia's six-month enforcement record is strikingly bleak: 78 percent of banned teenagers continue accessing Instagram and TikTok via VPNs, borrowed parental Face IDs, and freshly created accounts. Rather than regulating the addictive platform design — infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic dopamine loops — engineered by Big Tech, these bans expel the very victims of that design from the platforms while leaving the machinery completely intact. This article argues that the synchronized global wave of teen social media legislation is the cheapest form of political self-congratulation available to lawmakers unwilling to confront the trillion-dollar industry actually responsible for the harm.

6/6/2026