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Why are today's teens putting off driving, dating and drinking?

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Re: Why are today's teens putting off driving, dating and drinking?

#141

Post by arkh »

redleggedfrog wrote: post #9

Good parenting? As a parent, I was proud that my sons waited to date, took public transportation or rode their bikes, don't drink cause they're not 21 yet, and decided to have sex at the perfectly reasonable age of 19. I did like how the end of the article mentioned how scary the world is today. They should try living through the Cold War, and the time of Crips and Bloods, and gas lines, and the housing crash. Now th…

> don't drink cause they're not 21 yet

That's how you get drunk people once they're free to buy alcohol. Parents should help their children discover alcohol safely at home so it is not some mystical drink you can't wait to get your hands on. A glass of good wine here and there during family reunions, one or two beers with the barbecue, maybe some whiskey and vodka to learn what the good stuff tastes like. Suddenly it becomes "this drink with a special taste which gives you a light buzz".

Re: Why are today's teens putting off driving, dating and drinking?

#143

Post by ben_w »

colecut wrote: post #126
PrimalDual wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are failing to take into account compounded interest and opportunity cost. Efforts you make when you’re young get compounded during the rest of your life time and the time you spend learning the intricacies of human mating is time that you could spend doing so many other things. Especially today when you can’t just start working at a factory at 18 and expect lifetime employment. Not just that, human matin…

Do you think these thoughts are going through the minds of most 17 year olds?

Humans do post-hoc rationalisation for whatever acts they perform and emotional states they experience; I expect Kids These Days have biases in those directions that they may ultimately justify in ways like that, even if the real reason is, say, a general expectation in the last year of highschol that you have three to four more years to go before being an adult instead of just zero to one.

Re: Why are today's teens putting off driving, dating and drinking?

#144

Post by mercer »

Mz wrote: post #121
pixl97 wrote: post #15

There are a pile of different answers to these questions (not question), ones that should be asked separately. For example, excluding factors that affect all the questions, putting off drinking is likely a combination of consumer education and the difficulty in getting alcohol pre-21. Fewer adults want to provide their younger peers alcohol because of legal risks. Driving is the combination of increasing expense to d…

Sex probably includes factors of better sexual education. I knew a guy older than me who came of age in the hippie era. He had slept with a lot more people than me. He once said "TV channels stopped broadcasting at 9pm. There wasn't anything else to do after 9 o'clock at night besides sex and drugs." You can now get TV and internet 24/7 and even in small towns you can sometimes find stores and eateries open at all ho…

I agree that it's not a bad thing necessarily, but I think the increase in mental health issues and loneliness (which often go together) might in part be caused by this ability to get some of our needs met in ways that at best provide a surrogate for other or perhaps deeper needs.

Looking at myself, for example, I can safely say that I'm a bit of a loner. But the truth is that I get a fairly decent amount of social interaction through the internet. In some ways this meets my needs better than real life: I can't think of any real-world 'community' quite like this one, for example.

But in other ways it's become very clear to me, usually when I am forced to get out and be around people and suddenly realize how much I needed that kind of interaction, that my online communities are lacking in fundamental ways. I suppose porn is an even more concrete example of this. Another example would be the ridiculous amount of 'quality' shows/movies that offer a surrogate for experiencing relationships and places and events.

The convenience I have of being able to stay at home and 'interact' with others in particular way, on my own terms, has the disadvantage that it requires me to know what is good for me and actively manage that, in the same way that the convenience of porn makes it easy for me to not bother 'grooming my feathers', so to speak, and heading out to meet potential mates.

That's not to say any of these things are inherently bad, of course.

Re: Why are today's teens putting off driving, dating and drinking?

#145

Post by Mz »

mercer wrote: post #144
Mz wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sex probably includes factors of better sexual education. I knew a guy older than me who came of age in the hippie era. He had slept with a lot more people than me. He once said "TV channels stopped broadcasting at 9pm. There wasn't anything else to do after 9 o'clock at night besides sex and drugs." You can now get TV and internet 24/7 and even in small towns you can sometimes find stores and eateries open at all ho…

I agree that it's not a bad thing necessarily, but I think the increase in mental health issues and loneliness (which often go together) might in part be caused by this ability to get some of our needs met in ways that at best provide a surrogate for other or perhaps deeper needs. Looking at myself, for example, I can safely say that I'm a bit of a loner. But the truth is that I get a fairly decent amount of social i…

I was much lonelier in my marriage than I have been since my divorce. This has been very eye opening.

Being alone and being lonely are not the same thing and not necessarily even related. Loneliness is an unmet emotional hunger that is not automatically met by being around other people.

Being lonely while not alone is a kind of hell that simply being alone does not begin to match. While married, I really thought I could never tolerate being single. But it turns out my marriage was emotionally vampiric and actively draining me of any ability to experience contentment.

My post divorce experience has not gone remotely like I expected. It has been wonderfully better than the dystopian nightmare I had envisioned for so very long.

Which is not a rebuttal of your remarks. Just some late night thoughts on the topic that hopefully add something to the conversation.

Re: Why are today's teens putting off driving, dating and drinking?

#146

Post by Chiba-City »

Driving and drinking in common forms are wastes of time or dangerous. Commutes specifically are now the #6 cause of full blown clinical depression. The easiest form of "helicopter parenting" was turning off TV's. Now YouTube lets parents turn of ads. Novelty status seeking, post-war PTSD and novel TV 1-way broadcast made drinking or driving seem attractive. I know parents who forbid gaming, TV fictions and even cheap factory franchise food wholesale. Their kids have time to do everything else live and in person. Not dating is a demographic phenomenon. I was born in '66 and none of us feared incurable diseases. The divorce rates are so high and peer-available literacy and even maximum attention spans so low many kids have no interest in family formation. Demographer predict 25% of unmarried Americans will never even marry. During WW2 26% of Italian women were nuns. Global TFR's are falling and Japan has been depopulating faster than their deflation for net wins. Japan and Britain are net importers of water (via foodstuffs). The instincts for not breeding are smart. Various Amish populations have been booming. People seeking larger families should consider organic farming careers.

Re: Why are today's teens putting off driving, dating and drinking?

#147

Post by blubb-fish »

pixl97 wrote: post #15

There are a pile of different answers to these questions (not question), ones that should be asked separately. For example, excluding factors that affect all the questions, putting off drinking is likely a combination of consumer education and the difficulty in getting alcohol pre-21. Fewer adults want to provide their younger peers alcohol because of legal risks. Driving is the combination of increasing expense to d…

my guesses:

- no driving b/c no car b/c less income

- no sex b/c porn

- no booze b/c ... well, is that even true?

Re: Why are today's teens putting off driving, dating and drinking?

#148

Post by waterhouse »

mercer wrote: post #144
Mz wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sex probably includes factors of better sexual education. I knew a guy older than me who came of age in the hippie era. He had slept with a lot more people than me. He once said "TV channels stopped broadcasting at 9pm. There wasn't anything else to do after 9 o'clock at night besides sex and drugs." You can now get TV and internet 24/7 and even in small towns you can sometimes find stores and eateries open at all ho…

I agree that it's not a bad thing necessarily, but I think the increase in mental health issues and loneliness (which often go together) might in part be caused by this ability to get some of our needs met in ways that at best provide a surrogate for other or perhaps deeper needs. Looking at myself, for example, I can safely say that I'm a bit of a loner. But the truth is that I get a fairly decent amount of social i…

So people, faced with more options, will have to do more experimenting and observing to figure out what's best for them, as you're doing. By the end of it, presumably the best set of options that they find will be at least as good as what it would have been if they had fewer options, and for some people it'll probably be considerably better.

I, for one, think that anything that helps nerds (defined as those who pursue their intellectual interests while neglecting their social lives, often not developing social skills as a result) ease their social pain while they focus on their intellectual interests is a very good thing.

Re: Why are today's teens putting off driving, dating and drinking?

#149

Post by labster »

andai wrote: post #137
labster wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids these days, now we can't even store sex in a bool. And they want another float for gender! Back in my day we had one bit for each, and we liked it.

Wasn't it one for both , or is that too far back?

Probably too far back. We had the Kinsey scale in 1948, so that's a 0-7 for gender/sexual identity, and one bit for sex. Fits perfectly in a nibble.

Re: Why are today's teens putting off driving, dating and drinking?

#150

Post by pmjoyce »

mbroncano wrote: post #29
smileysteve wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I mean, do we want life to be uncomfortable for young people? Yes. The result of rubber playgrounds is surprisingly more serious injuries.

That's surprising indeed, citations?

from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/04/hey-par...

> Even rubber surfacing doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference in the real world. David Ball, a professor of risk management at Middlesex University, analyzed U.K. injury statistics and found that as in the U.S., there was no clear trend over time. “The advent of all these special surfaces for playgrounds has contributed very little, if anything at all, to the safety of children,” he told me. Ball has found some evidence that long-bone injuries, which are far more common than head injuries, are actually increasing.

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