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Let's End Adolescence

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Re: Let's End Adolescence

#161

Post by xiaoma »

justindz wrote: post #139
nazgulnarsil wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes a lot deeper than a few mismanaged lives. The disregard for personal responsibility and the subsequent politics that result will get much worse as generation x then y come of age.

Every generation thinks the next generation is lazy, shiftless, immoral and will destroy the world. It's been happening for a while. The worrying, not the destroying.

How so? We've already caused a greater mass extinction than the last ice age did, and it's accelerating. Red blooms are sprouting up in our oceans. Methane and CO2 levels in the atmosphere are increasing at an accelerating rate, too.

All the while, people are getting fatter and fatter, and less and less active. Our great grandparents had to struggle and suffer just to survive. Most of us have never dealt with true scarcity in our lives.

Each generation is getting lazier, more privilaged and more destructive.

Re: Let's End Adolescence

#162

Post by symptic »

I think the problem comes from a certain form of parental neglect. I'm only 22 and have no children, but it seems to me like given our greater disposable incomes, a lot of parents think it is easier to raise kids by throwing money at their development rather than time.

You can't raise children on the macro-scale. You raise them at the micro-levels.

Re: Let's End Adolescence

#163

Post by symptic »

danielhodgins wrote: post #149

It's all about responsibility. The guy/girl who has been working and starting companies is bound to be more responsible and accountable than their peers who are busy getting laid and partying. I totally agree that making adolescents more accountable would bring out the best in people and reduce social problems in that age group.

I wasn't aware entrepreneurs don't get laid. ;P

Re: Let's End Adolescence

#164

Post by qaexl »

run4yourlives wrote: post #136
qaexl wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the 13-year-old already has his heart set on something, I'm not going to stop him. But I suspect, at least with the first generation, they're going to screw around ... just like the first two or three years of college. Chances are good that if the area of study isn't something he wants to work with, he'll figure it out fast and get on with working on something else.

I would think that screwing around for a few years is exactly what you would want a 13 year old to do. Like you said, better finding your passions at 16 then at 22. Finding your passions though is an essential part of life and shouldn't be taken as "screwing around".

I think I didn't write the apprenticeship part very well.

Choosing an apprenticeship for the 13-year-old is meant to give them a nudge. It doesn't matter if they pick it up or rebel against it. What matters is getting out of the home to see the world. Travelling around the world (without family) accomplishes the same thing.

Staying within the comfort of the home is screwing around ... even if it is "exploring" your passions. That's just extending childhood. So what I should have said is that after getting the GED (or equivalent) parents push them out of the nest, whether that results from choosing an apprenticeship for them, or having them travel around the country, or having them take college courses at college campus. That is what the old rites of passages (and the hero myths that go with it) accomplish: force the adolescent out of childhood, just as being born means going from the comfort of the womb to the bright, cold world. And of course, there are some who already know what they want and will already have plans in motion.

There is an obstacle with this idea is that many jurisdictions require you to be 16 to take it. Yet I remember hearing of college prodigies earning their degrees before that. It makes me think there is a way to hack it.

Re: Let's End Adolescence

#165

Post by 0x44 »

omouse wrote: post #137
hugh wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which isn't a useful skill either. I want someone who can work like Knuth, not someone who can quote Knuth. Knuth didn't become Knuth by quoting people like Knuth.

If you can quote Knuth, there is a a large chance that you'll be able to understand what you just quoted and be able to apply it.

Can you quantify that probability?

Re: Let's End Adolescence

#166

Post by sharkfish »

wensing wrote: post #115
shaunxcode wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about people that choose to turn their "parental instinct" to have and nurture children towards helping their society as a whole instead? Is that also a sign of immaturity for lack of "progeny"?

Without downplaying anything done for society as a whole, I must say that it's unlikely you'll ever be as influential upon society as a whole as can be upon your own children. Also, children also have a way of exposing your weaknesses that is unique to their relationship with (and reflection of) you. Granted, these are just vehicles to maturity, not a promise of success. Everyone fails in some measure, some horribly.

"exposing your weaknesses"

Yeah. They bring out the ASS in some parents.

Re: Let's End Adolescence

#167

Post by whughes »

nihilocrat wrote: post #12
peakok wrote: post #3

It is naive to assume that "adolescence" was a concept invented out of the blue, then deliberately experimented by some politics, it never works this way. The opposite is true : at some point we needed a word to describe a change in society, and a new cultural phenomenon that didn't exist before. Then was born the concept of adolescence and the teenager, wich is a worldwide phenomenom in Occident and other parts of t…

Thus says the Online Etymology Dictionary ( http://www.etymonline.com/ ): teenage 1921, formed from -teen as a separate word + age; derived noun teenager is from 1941 (the earlier word for this was teener, attested in Anmer.Eng. from 1894). Teen-aged (adj.) is from 1952; shortened form teen is from 1951 (though this had been used as a noun to mean "teen-aged person" in 1818). Teeny-bopper is recorded from 1966, from…

Adolescence is from antiquity, but the meaning has diluted to become the same thing as 'teenagerhood' recently, if I recall correctly. It was more like being a 'young man' prior to that.
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