> Hardships do come from high screen time, definitely. The poor job market is not one of them.
This times a thousand. I wouldn't have the jobs I do today if I didn't spend probably on balance an unhealthy amount of time in front of my own screens in the 90's. I got into programming because I loved screens and wanted to make them show me different things.
The difference today is two-fold IMO:
* The job market, as stated, is shit, especially for tech right now. For decades kiddos have been propagandized into going into a future in comp science of varying depths and qualities, both here in the US, and overseas. We have more tech workers than ever, wages are falling because of over-supply, and too many are focused on niche framework technologies who's skills don't translate well across the wide breadth of what's actually used in industry. Example: my company is hiring right now and it's DIRE to try and find mobile developers who actually develop in Kotlin/Java/Swift/Objective-C. I'm drowning in resumes for React developers but we don't use any of that and have no desire to.
* The screens now used by would-be budding hackers are locked down to hell and back, and were put in their hands when they were likely still shitting in their pants (no judgement of course, we all did it for awhile) and they don't conceive of them as "machines I could play with" but instead, simply as a never ending font of distraction and entertainment, perfectly curated to their individual desires.
I took the ancestor comment to be more about the "3-4 hours a day on social media" than time on a screen doing something like learning/improving programming skills.
Now, if you're spending three hours a day writing your blog and promoting your reputation as a skilled developer that's possibly going to help you. If you spend it surfing TikTok that's almost certainly going to do nothing for you. Though back in my 20s I could waste hours just watching stupid shit on TV.
It's possibly harder now to get a great job offer right out of school, but getting a lot of rejections as a new graduate isn't new either. It used to be a thing for seniors near graduation to paper their living room or hallway with all their rejection letters.
Most people are average. They will end up with average jobs and earning average money. One negative thing about social media is that it makes the top overachievers seem normal, and when you compare their lives (at least as they portray them) to your own it can make you feel hopeless.
>If you spend it surfing TikTok that's almost certainly going to do nothing for you.
On the contrary, it's likely to substantially misinform you and wreck your attention span. That's not very helpful though.