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Comment by purple-again | Hacker News Reader

Except from 2010 - 2015 many teens did feel a crushing sense of economic dread as they dealt with the realities of student loans, an out of reach housing market, devalued college degrees, the gig economy, promises of no retirement, etc.

The article just skims over it with a quick this is why economics couldn’t have been the reason.

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> the realities of student loans, an out of reach housing market, devalued college degrees, the gig economy, promises of no retirement, etc.

Have you ever met a teenager? Almost literally zero percent of them think (or need to think) about this stuff, with the possible exception of some of the very oldest teenagers (ie, people in their first or second year of college who are starting to think about the details of the start of their careers).

Yeah, I feel like there's some projection going on with GP and those issues. Teenagers don't stress about mortgages or retirement.

Although they used teenager. I think most of those things probably more accurately describe a young adult

> Have you ever met a teenager?

Yes. And we've all been teenagers.

>Almost literally zero percent of them think (or need to think) about this stuff, with the possible exception of some of the very oldest teenagers (ie, people in their first or second year of college who are starting to think about the details of the start of their careers).

What? EVERY teenager thinks about it. Not only that, their parents financial situations and the prospects of the future most definitely influences their outlook.

What teenager doesn't talk about or think of their future? The entirety of high school is pretty much about preparing for college, finding a job, etc.

> What teenager doesn't talk about or think of their future?

I don't want to get into why, but I didn't. If someone doesn't really think they have a future, what's there to think about?

Yes, preparing for _college_ and _finding a job_. The details of how you're going to pay your day to day are far hazier, as are things like "the gig economy" and retirement.

If you were worrying about your future mortgage when you're a teenager, I can assure you you were in the minuscule minority.

Teenagers I do know personally talk about being worried about jobs, housing, debt and general economical problems. I never start those discussions, they do.

I worried about these things as a teen over 30 years ago. No social media then. Teens worry. It's part of the awakening of adult patterns of thought.

That sounds like a branch of the problem being discussed here. If you’re 16 and worried about housing options, something is wrong imo.

I strongly disagree. If you are 16 and it seems like you won't be able to get living and there is stigma attached to living with parents, worrying about it is sign that you think about world around you. That is healthy.

16 years old are not necessary movie dumbos. It is time when people form opinions and think a lot. The result does not have to be hapiness, if indeed expectations on you and your possibilities don't match.

Well, yea. The housing market is super fucked up, that’s what’s wrong.

I guess but why would teenagers of all people care about this? You don't need a house. Many of the kids I knew growing up lived in apartments.

If they lived in a house they could inherit it from their parents. Why is the housing market something children worry about?

> You don't need a house. Many of the kids I knew growing up lived in apartments.

Apartments are part of the housing market

> If they lived in a house they could inherit it from their parents.

Teenagers probably want to move out of their parents home (be it a house or apartment).

> Why is the housing market something children worry about?

See above : teenagers often want and look forward to independence, and housing is 100% central to that goal. Their future horizon may be a little shallower than that of the average adult, but they do have a horizon - i.e short term goals that they want to achieve.

At least for me, that meant figuring out how I was going to actually live on my own come 18. You can bet I was worried about housing prices (even if my immediate goal was to rent).

Teenagers are worried about where they're going to live, and staying with their parents well into adulthood is usually not a desired option.

> If they lived in a house they could inherit it from their parents.

Heh "hi mom, dad, FYI I'm planning to live with you and my two siblings until I'm around 50 and then you can die and it'll just be us three kids here".

Also, by "house" I meant "dwelling/residence".

When I was a teenager I didn’t think further than 5 years ahead. I did however write goth poetry, become Wiccan (and thus got all mopey about being at a Catholic school), get upset how unfair it was that UK law looked down on my sexuality (it had not yet equalised the gay and straight ages of consent), and frustrated how ridiculous it was for the Prime Minister to veto every EU thing he could in protest against the BSE-related ban on British beef. Ended up writing loads of letters to newspapers about politics of the day before internet comments were a big thing, then going to university really worried if my student loan would cover everything.

Their parents would have been very stressed and the kids would have unconsciously picked up on it.

Teenagers might not think in these terms, but their parents do. Aside from parents directly projecting their vision on children, kids can read anxiety or stress from their parents and be ‘contamined’ by these feelings.

Right, absolutely. That's a different claim from the GP comment, and a reasonable one. The authors noted that the symptoms were independent of economic indicators. Now obviously this study is an initial result, and thus fairly preliminary (if you believe any effect in social science after a single study, you haven't been paying attention). But it's not like this is a rebuttal of the study's claims.

You must have known a mindless set of teenagers. When I was a teenager people actively talked about their resentment that arts and humanities were not going to get them a well paying job and society was biased in favor of people like me who found math and science easy. And this would have been tenth grade, if not earlier.

Edit: for historical context, this was nearly two decades ago and nobody had either a mobile phone or a Facebook account

Only the oldest of teens would worry about those things. I agree they're all bad but I'm not convinced they'd have much of an impact on under 17 year olds.

I'm extremely hacked off that the high school I'm sending my kids to requires students to have an ipad. It's expensive for me, of no benefit to the student, and makes it difficult for students and parents to figure out what homework is due becuase it's scattered around various websites depending on the teacher's whim. It also means he has a screen to fight with us over that he would not have had otherwise. Then the younger kids get annoyed he has one and they don't. There is no upside.

I asked my oldest son why he doesn't invite his friends around more often and he said 'I can talk to them online'.

> no benefit to the student

No benefit? Maybe you mean that you prefer an Android tablet? I didn't have a computer until I was 18. The internet wasn't much of a thing until I got to college. Every day I think about how amazing it would have been to have access to so much free information when I was a kid.

I spent much of my teenage years playing video games, building/overclocking computers, flashing roms on my phones, and devouring wikipedia. my parents were concerned that I was spending too much time online but I'm glad they didn't try to intervene. I was learning tons and by the time I got to college pretty much everything in the CS degree was trivially easy for me (except some of the formal math stuff).

on the flip side, I am quite certain that most of my peers spent their hours primarily on youtube, facebook, and aim. they seemed to take pride in how little they understood the workings of their entertainment devices.

today I hear a lot of parents talking about how they are putting off getting a family computer/tablet for as long as possible and how they intend to severely limit screen time once they finally get one. it makes me sad to think that these children will miss out on all the great learning experiences I had with my computers, but I'm not sure the parents are necessarily wrong, especially with the current buzz around social media and mental health.

I get it, and what I was responding to was the "no benefit" comment. I carry research articles and books on my phone that I can read with any spare moment. It's amazing actually, and I don't see the point of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

> on the flip side, I am quite certain that most of my peers spent their hours primarily on youtube, facebook, and aim. they seemed to take pride in how little they understood the workings of their entertainment devices.

People, kids especially, love wasting time. All that changes is how they do the time wasting.

I guess nothing has changed much haha. I was a teenager in the late 90s and early 00s; none of that existed. The only kids using computers then were interested in games, hacking on them, or using them for some productivity task.

How many people are interested in how cars work vs just use them to get around? Computing is just ubiquitous now but people who really care about how they work are still a small minority.

I spent every waking hour tinkering with my C64, and made a career from that.

But a C64 is a very different beast from a ipad or even a rpi. I think the percentage of owners back then tinkered with them as well as just loading up games was much higher.

I haven't heard of a single kid in my son's classes who has tried programming. The thing is just a TV/mobile game console.

Thank god they haven't hit facebook yet, at least the ones I know.

No, I mean a tablet is a stupid thing for a school student to have. I could sort of see the point of a cheap laptop or chromebook - at least typing on them is reasonable. But there is nothing wrong with writing on paper either.

Teachers giving homework printed on paper makes it easier for the student and parent to know what homework there is to be done.

And printing from tablets? Come on. I don't know about Android tablets but it ain't easy from an iPad.

My kids aren't living in some tech backwater - we have more than enough computers from 8 to 64 bits they could do something useful with.

But there is no upside to me having to buy each of them an iPad - not for me or them. Even iPad games are just stupid free-to-play-pay-to-speed-up-progress games. All the kids give each other for birthday these days are itunes cards that get spend on 'gems'.

The whole thing is a disaster. Get off my lawn.

> I'm extremely hacked off that the high school I'm sending my kids to requires students to have an ipad

My nephews in primary school had android tablets but had to get new ipads (second hand not supported) for the "programming" class that was introduced with proprietary drag'n'drop programming software. A raspberry pi would not only have been much cheaper but would have had much more potential as an educational tool.

Yeah, or a build-it-yourself Z80 kit. I'm not being sarcastic.

An rpi or an arduino would be way better than an iPad.

I don't think many teens (13-18) are doing much deep thinking about those things. I was a teenager about a bit more about than a decade before this time period, so maybe things were just so great then I didn't consider these things. But it seems like a stretch to me that a middle school or high school student is depressed because they are worried about retirement. Things like that were far too abstract to be contributing factors to my mental state at that age.

Currently a father of teens... That is a huge subject of discussion in high schools. Teens do talk a lot about the economy, ROI of different degrees (nursing being the best, law school and engineering giving less chance of jobs and being much harder, everything else being useless), that their passions don't matter, they have to get a degree that leads to jobs, number of years before they can afford living on their own etc...

Am teenager. I'm not too worried about my future because I have some decent development skills. However, a lot of my friends are depressed because a lot of these issues really aren't so far in the future as to be "too abstract." It doesn't take a huge mental leap to realize that the college educations we're about to drop $50k+ on might not help us get jobs in the near future, or that working until we die will sort of suck, or that a pregnancy is an instant game-over (but it's okay, because apparently teens don't have sex anymore), or that most of the jobs we're going to end up getting are meaningless and will soon be automated away, so why not just off ourselves right now? It's scary. I sure as hell hope that tech now is the equivalent of the factory jobs of the 40's, so by the time my skills don't matter, I'll be set or dead.

Sounds like you guys are way more in touch with this than we were. I guess it could make sense with how fast information gets around. When I was 13 the only way I would get this information would be through newspaper or TV news, which I didn't have time for.. I was playing hockey with my friends and playing video games if our parents didn't kick us outside.

I regret saying too abstract, I intended more to say this stuff was too far into the future that it would really worry me. I figured we were smart enough that by the time I got older we'd figure out a way to make life easier for everyone.

Maybe I was just dumb!

There are a lot of memes that go around people my age/younger than me (I'm 24), that make reference to depression / the fact that people don't really think that they have a chance at making a decent life. It's a humorous take on it, but it's manifesting a deeper anxiety, and it seems to have become a big thing in the past two years or so.

I moved to America about 18 months ago from New Zealand, and noticed that while Americans have more "stuff" they carry a lot more anxiety too. There's a lot less room for error. I think that's the same thing that's happened over generations. We've squeezed the big things - wages, housing prices, middle-class jobs and pumped up our general consumption. So we have more, but less security.

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