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Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

economist.com

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Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#301

Post by anticsapp »

_5yps wrote: post #27

16-year-old here. My experience is probably markedly different from most teenagers in the US (I'm an immigrant who goes to a competitive school full of other immigrants) but I find that, for the most part, this article hits the nail on the head. High School is nothing like the usual media portrayal - I've never heard anyone even talk about a party, nobody's doing anything stronger than weed, nobody's fucking or even…

>the Ivy League (everyone knows that's just luck of the draw

> the "second-tier" schools (Carnegie-Mellon, Rensselaer, Duke, Cornell, etc.)

I love this. And I'm not putting you down, I didn't know Cornell was an Ivy until I was 22. It reminds of the funny jokes at Andy Bernard's expense on The Office.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#302

Post by ReptileMan »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #134
ReptileMan wrote: post #18

So for the first time in world history the people that complain about "youngsters these days are worse" are right.

At least in the history as far as we can remember, yeah; another HN article a while ago said that it's likely that for the first time since the industrial revolution, the young generation will be worse off than the previous ones whereas before that it was always an upwards trend. I mean we've had three serious financial crises in our lifetime.

Still not a reason to be tame.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#303

Post by blunderkid »

In 30 years if not sooner, humanity will look back and be horrified with this time when we let a whole vulnerable generation fall prey to social media and hyper connectivity while parents bought stocks of the very same recreational drug manufacturers and peddlers who hooked our children to their product.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#304

Post by closeparen »

alexhutcheson wrote: post #242
vegetablepotpie wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish adults understood the realities of being young in 2020. Even when I graduated HS in 2007 I could tell my experience and the academic expectations I needed to live up to were much higher than it was for my mom. After I graduated I saw younger friends take more AP classes than I did and do more leadership activities than I did. Expectations are always ramping up. It is no party. Our laws and bureaucracies haven’…

FWIW, this isn't so much a story of "being young in 2020" as it is "being young in 2020 in the hyper-competitive culture of major coastal metro areas of the US". This phenomenon is actually pretty unique to a handful of metro areas, which happen to be over-represented on HN. In most of the country, bright high school students are focused on getting into their state's flagship public university, and exceptionally succ…

This is the segment of every part of the country that aspires to those costal metro areas. The driving motivation is "get me the hell out of this godforsaken place."

The personal cost was immense, but I'm glad I did. I got to do fun and high-impact work at a fast-rising startup while my title and TC leapt up by $50-$100k each year. I got to meet friends from all over the world, travel, hike, run outdoors year-round, never shovel snow again, walk to everything I need from my high-rise apartment.

At home I'd be lucky to have made Help Desk Technician II for $17/hour, lucky to have a car that starts, lucky to know a single personal socially who had ever voluntarily read a book. Most of my classmates who stayed aren't working at all. The only ones really thriving had guaranteed slots at family businesses.

It's not a poor place. Everyone's parents made a decent living. But the firms at which they did so were in either stasis or decline, not desperate to hire 22-year-olds.

The delayed gratification story is very much real.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#305

Post by peterangular »

guntars wrote: post #260
softwaredoug wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a parent, I've noticed the biggest problem that prevents "free range" kids is other adults without kids. Those of us WITH kids relish getting the kids outside and out of our hair. But those without kids frequently are calling the parents to complain our children are roaming the neighborhood, perhaps on their property. Or they fear these kids will create problems. Usually, however, they're just kids being kids. Goi…

I don’t know, kids being kids is just another word for getting in trouble. I certainly wouldn’t want kids roaming around my property if they are anything like I was at that age.

It's liability. Letting people onto your property is liability no matter what the context. Unsupervised kids roaming my property is a no-go and not my responsibility.

I get that people want to have their ideals here, but there's a whole "risk to the property owner" side to this conversation that's not happening.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#306

Post by vmception »

vegetablepotpie wrote: post #182
_5yps wrote: post #27

16-year-old here. My experience is probably markedly different from most teenagers in the US (I'm an immigrant who goes to a competitive school full of other immigrants) but I find that, for the most part, this article hits the nail on the head. High School is nothing like the usual media portrayal - I've never heard anyone even talk about a party, nobody's doing anything stronger than weed, nobody's fucking or even…

I wish adults understood the realities of being young in 2020. Even when I graduated HS in 2007 I could tell my experience and the academic expectations I needed to live up to were much higher than it was for my mom. After I graduated I saw younger friends take more AP classes than I did and do more leadership activities than I did. Expectations are always ramping up. It is no party. Our laws and bureaucracies haven’…

There was a time when I looked "down" on tiers of schools, differently.

It was like what I was qualified for was better, Ivy League was a pipe dream and unnecessary, and everything else was a joke.

Around my sophomore year, I was interning in a Federal Work Study program, pushing pencils right next to someone studying a Princeton. When I realized this fate was still intertwined, I immediately transferred to a cheaper school with a less coveted reputation, and also took summer and winter community college courses to get a few extra credits to just get out of there faster and cheaper.

My current thoughts are that Ivy League is a world of its own (along with a few others like Stanford), and then everything else. Nobody cares about how good your state school is at Journalism/Business/Finance/Econ/Computer Science, at that level you either have the degree or not. At Ivy League, the network and opportunities are totally different, and the association is more important since you just go there to drop out anyway and say you went. The faster you drop out the cooler.

All I can say is that the cards I had available to play became very clear.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#307

Post by idoby »

_bxg1 wrote: post #193
_5yps wrote: post #27

16-year-old here. My experience is probably markedly different from most teenagers in the US (I'm an immigrant who goes to a competitive school full of other immigrants) but I find that, for the most part, this article hits the nail on the head. High School is nothing like the usual media portrayal - I've never heard anyone even talk about a party, nobody's doing anything stronger than weed, nobody's fucking or even…

I graduated HS 10 years ago and it was pretty similar in my experience, maybe a bit less extreme. There were some "stereotypical teens" at my school but they were a minority. Everyone I was surrounded by was trying to squeeze in as many AP courses as they could, as many officer positions in different extracurricular organizations (NHS, band/choir/orchestra, yearbook, athletics, etc) as they could. Our valedictorian a…

> the "popular kids" at school were the overachievers, not the jocks

This may be a silver lining in an otherwise very gloomy comment page? When I was in HS (though not in the US), popularity was highly correlated with wealth and/or political activism.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#308

Post by as1mov »

magicsmoke wrote: post #202
allannienhuis wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But those aren't the two options. If loss of life were equal due to equal participation, you'd get 45% loss of each sex (using your 90% of men figure as the potential loss), which (while still devastating) isn't the same argument for losing the breeding capacity of the country. The reality is that those sorts of rules are very much based on culture tradition ('historic'). It takes a long time for parts of our culture…

Scenario A: 100 women, 100 men. 100 men go off to war, 10 men return. But with polygamy, 100 women have 100 children for the next generation. Scenario B: 100 women, 100 men. 50 women and 50 men go off to war, 5 men and 5 women return. You have 55 women left in the population and 55 children for the next generation. The limiting factor in human population growth is the number of women that can have children. The cold…

It's a good thing then we don't have any country with just 200 people in them.

It's same excuse used when someone asks why safety of women comes before men, conveniently ignoring that the scenario itself is so far out, it's not going to happen.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#309

Post by [deleted] »

relativitypro wrote: post #279
_5yps wrote: post #27

16-year-old here. My experience is probably markedly different from most teenagers in the US (I'm an immigrant who goes to a competitive school full of other immigrants) but I find that, for the most part, this article hits the nail on the head. High School is nothing like the usual media portrayal - I've never heard anyone even talk about a party, nobody's doing anything stronger than weed, nobody's fucking or even…

Is this your env or you? Chances are you are a Silicon Valley native, and you have at least 4-5x the reaources and advantages of kids on average in the us. Many don’t or can’t go to college, not because they wouldn’t if they were you, but because they can’t because they aren’t you.

[deleted]

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#310

Post by abhayb »

It's been 10 years since I was a well behaved and anhedonic teenager. Not only did I fit what the newspaper describes but I actually read the The Economist cover to obituary (the obit is the best part). Now that I'm past that it seems the "wild years" don't so much disappear as move back half a decade.
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