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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)

#61

Post by searchableguy »

ulisesrmzroche wrote: post #42

Wow, that’s so sad. Y’all raising your kids horrible, no bueno whatsoever. America was born in a tavern. Ben Franklin was a real lady killer. Churchill saved our world mostly hungover. Jimmy Hendrix really thought he was a Martian These kids will never amount to anything. Lost generation. Hope there’s a huge backlash...there has to be, human spirit isn’t built for such a sad and pathetic life - hell, at this point, I…

Your site is down. You will never amount to anything if you can't keep a 99.999% uptime. Go learn about distributed kubernetes instead of calling kids pathetic here. Shoo!

:) https://ulisesrmzroche.info/

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

#62

Post by foldr »

michaelt wrote: post #50
nil-sec wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building your identity should not be tied to building your brand when you are 16. I’ve grown up in Europe but lived in the US for some time. What I noticed is a distinct lack of subculture in young people (college), everyone seems to be very homogenized and this is in stark contrast to what I perceived in Europe. Of course this is anecdotal but I wonder if this is a result of this crazy system that doesn’t allow miss…

Isn't "building your personal brand" just a synonym for "building your resume" or "building your reputation"? At least, unless you're planning to become an Instagram influencer with their own line of cosmetics? I can assure you, kids have been doing extracurriculars that look good on college applications for longer than most of us have been alive.

My resume when I was 16 (in the UK) was "passed high school exams, did paper round". That was perfectly normal, and I wasn't worried about it how it compared to my peers'.

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

#63

Post by pjc50 »

_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 main thing I notice among my peers is an obsessive (borderline autistic) focus on "getting in" and having good credentials

I wouldn't describe this as exibitionist or even pathological; it's not something that kids are simply choosing to do in a vacuum, but something that they've been encouraged to do all their lives. And it's not an unusual situation historically either. Without careful attention, it's easy for the education system to devolve into something like the Imperial Chinese system, where careful memorization of a fixed set of beautiful but useless classical poetry forms would be required to qualify as a provincial administrator in a system in which the social mobility of adults was almost zero.

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

#65

Post by _5yps »

foldr wrote: post #54
_5yps wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen a lot of kids my age become Communists or Nazis due to internet-induced radicalization; I was rather close to becoming a radical leftist myself. Personally, I think it's harmless; they tend not to hold these views for a long time when tempered with the saner views of their peers and broader society. It's like the chicken pox - you get it once, become a bit nasty for a while, and then you're immune to furthe…

It makes sense that trans people would be left-leaning because people who aren't left-leaning tend (painting with broad brushstrokes) to be opposed to equal treatment for trans people. Similarly, trans people can often be quite socially isolated because it's difficult for them to integrate into a transphobic society. In the US, there are 26 states where it's perfectly legal to fire someone simply for being trans. Bey…

I agree with you on that last point - I'm talking largely about the trans people who are very online and very vocal about it (a self-selected demographic), not trans people in general.

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

#66

Post by mnky9800n »

_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…

Ah yes, the second tier of Carnegie Mellon and Cornell. Lol.

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

#67

Post by LocalH »

Reelin wrote: post #12
_630w wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can give some perspective on that. Ignoring the increase in academic pressure and hungry sharks in education (those shady coaching institutes everywhere making you grind 5 hours after school for a single exam). Parents haven't caught up with how their kids interact with the world. Social media is huge for teens and internet which only now some parents are catching up to but they are on Facebook and Facebook is canc…

> Twitter is not healthy for a teenager. Twitter isn't healthy for _anyone_. Neither is the vast majority of social media. The way in which most sites currently structure interactions lends itself quite naturally to misinformation, extreme polarization, and resulting anxiety. I've personally witnessed the effect on reasonably well educated adults in my life; I can only imagine how much worse it must be for those with…

Twitter isn't healthy or unhealthy. It's about how the platform is used. For discussion of political or social issues, it's garbage, certainly. But there's a lot of other content on Twitter as well.

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

#68

Post by foldr »

_5yps wrote: post #65
foldr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes sense that trans people would be left-leaning because people who aren't left-leaning tend (painting with broad brushstrokes) to be opposed to equal treatment for trans people. Similarly, trans people can often be quite socially isolated because it's difficult for them to integrate into a transphobic society. In the US, there are 26 states where it's perfectly legal to fire someone simply for being trans. Bey…

I agree with you on that last point - I'm talking largely about the trans people who are very online and very vocal about it (a self-selected demographic), not trans people in general.

Even so, there are uncomfortable undertones in comparing those people to neo-Nazis and the like. If you think that radical trans activists are in some meaningful way comparable to neo-Nazis and other violent thugs, or that they are mentally ill, then it may be you who has been taken in by online propaganda.

I guess it annoys me that you left this little ad-hominem in parentheses at the end of your original comment. If you have some kind of issue with trans people or trans rights, you should really just say what that is, rather than making these kinds of comparisons.

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

#69

Post by montenegrohugo »

MrJagil wrote: post #60
montenegrohugo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have your own blog? I am impressed with the prose and content (and perspective! seems incredibly self-aware) of this comment, _especially_ considering your age. Since you say you too are playing the exhibition game, do you have a personal website? If not, I'm sure people would read what you have to write. It's interesting.

Truly ironic that the first comment is a request for a blog post.

It is not ironic; it is in direct response to what he wrote. He mentions extensively the importance of building one's brand, and that even he is a victim of that mindset. Therefore I am curious IF he has a blog, and I am curious what that blog contains in case that it exists.

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

#70

Post by jhanschoo »

blfr wrote: post #31
_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…

All that building your brand and trying to convince people of your identity in place of actually having one is not exhibitionism but narcissism. There used to be a very good blog about this being the root of cultural and social rot we see around us. https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/

This pseudopsychological explanation for an rational response is really ridiculous. These 16-year-olds are developing their resumes not because they're narcissistic. They're doing so because everyone's very plausibly saying that being middle-income is getting harder and harder to live as, and they're anxious to get into a good university to help their career prospects.

> All that building your brand and trying to convince people of your identity in place of actually having one

Well, that's because college admissions value seem to value identities like robotics / programming club president more than identities like having fun with friends and trying different things together (secondarily to the friendship), which seems to be a more mentally healthy pursuit and better for cultivating a healthy identity but not what admissions are looking for.

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