Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/

And the stuff about sexual intercourse - really? Such a far cry from my own high school years (in the seventies), I can hardly believe it. Sounds more like the stuff I would try to convince my mother, with mixed success.

Otherwise, kudos for such mastery of language at 16.

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.

IMO, you are well above it all, or may be you will get there in a couple of years. You are doing fantastic for someone who is 16. Most people do not achieve this level of self-awareness even when they are 60. But there is a dark side to this precociousness. You are not ignorant, and that will often drive you to despair when you observe the simians around you. Like they say ignorance is bliss.

I was in honors and AP programs in high school in the 90s and I’d have described a similar dynamic at my school, until one year my ADHD got the better of me and I failed english and had to go to summer school. It turns out a whole lot of kids in my high school were doing drugs and having parties and having sex. They just aren’t in your classes at your school.

That was the best summer of my high school experience, FWIW.

Not too long ago, my company sent out teams to interview students from Stanford. Without fail, all of them mentioned some feeling of alienation from their peers due to the ridiculous status games. One foreign student who was relatively poor talked about dorm-mates who would fly first class back to LA or NY for the weekend and boast about it. It was a kind of revolting illustration.

Helping your fellow human beings and living a life of service to them is what is ultimately important. I think this generation may actually be primed to give us a lot of hope in this regard, but I hope that you can listen to it. And if I may be so bold, I believe that many would be well-served by realizing that out there beyond the cosmos above us is something that deeply loves each of us.

This sickness was around a decade ago when I was in HS but it sounds like its gotten worse.

I think the documentation of a persons entire life from birth has removed the opportunity for kids to make mistakes and learn while they are young. It's unfortunate because I did a lot of dumb things as a kid, and while none of it was too serious, I was able to learn lessons without having it necessarily follow me around the rest of my life. Now they are all just entertaining stories.

That's easy to explain: You don't have to talk about these things anymore, because of IM & co.. It's all still happening, but it's easier to hide it from the "dweebs". I've seen both sides, and it's really surprising how well this unwritten system works. At best you realize a few years or decades later.

Cornell is an ivy league school, and calling the likes of cmu and Duke "second tier" schools?? by any metric they're on par or. better with ivy league schools

But this: "Enjoying your life and doing things that you take pride in are secondary to the all-encompassing drive to impress people who know nothing about you. "

I'm sorry to say is a vicious new Anglo/American trend that used to be only for specific groups 30 years ago and has metastasized ... sadly into everything.

Please don't let it steal your youth.

Consider that most of it doesn't work, that people have pretty good subconscious BS filters. Just be yourself. At the office, obviously a little more than that, but even then worry less about 'personal brand' there is nothing to gain.

It is a horrifying notion that you are only valued based on the output of your blog / FB / twitter account. I used to think that for every cultural movement there is a counter-movement that tries to invert the values of a previous generation. Are there people in your circle that explicitly reject this notion of self commodification and exhibitionism?

One thing that has not seemed to change: people are entirely focused on doing well at the same game, usually the one where the winners were decided long ago. This is funny/weird because often the idols they seek to emulate rejected the main game of their time, pursued something different and were the successful survivors in a completely new field. We seem to miss this point.

You self-realization and understanding of the crazy aspects of your situation is something that sets you apart from the masses; don't lose this perspective.

If you don't want to be a part of the bullshit show, you've got to learn to distinguish between problem-driven projects and show-driven projects. The former are scarce, and the latter are intentionally disguised to pass for the real thing, but unless you learn to see the difference, you'll be stuck in a rather depressive loop of being a prized trophy sitting on a shelf.

My bet is that the COVID-19 pandemic will bring enormous attention to biomedical research, vaccine development, immunology, etc. New discoveries will be made, that would also apply to many less critical conditions. Of course, there will be a fair share of Theranos-like scams, so have your bullshit detector up and running.

Our laws and bureaucracies haven’t caught up to life from 50 years ago, and that is something young people today have to deal with too. There are a lot of incongruities in programs offered. One example is Federal Work Study. In college I qualified, it was a benefit, and my attitude was to not leave anything on the table. In reality the money I made was not enough to make a difference and the time I spent working could have been spent taking another class. If I didn’t do work study I could have graduated a semester sooner and that would have been much more valuable financially. The only reason to work in college would be at a job that is directly related to your field.

And of course the adults don’t get it. Every once in a while you’ll hear about a congress person or a business leader say that college students aren’t pulling their own weight in society. The friends of your parents will ask you how you like going to college parties. Reality is you have a deep backlog of work from 6 classes, which are related but have very different concepts and you need to master them all in four months.

For all the effort you're making know this: you'll eventually be evaluated by a Gen-X or Millennial hiring manager. We largely don't care where you went to college. We've learned that name recognition means very little. It'll get you a job, but if you're one of those kids who "does nothing" on an extracurricular team, it'll show through on the job. You won't get promoted. We fucking hate micromanaging Ivy League grads who are too scared to take initiative and possibly make mistakes.

Sincerely,

An engineering manager who went to one of the "second-tier" schools you listed.

I'm not sure it's about exhibitionism, or some ego-driven motivation, but rather a profound fear about being left out of the group.

We know humans have biological social behaviors like cooperation but until social media we didn't really have ways to measure how others reacted to us. Seeing a number of likes, shares, upvotes, etc, is the ultimate drug for the social animal.

We didn't all have websites or talk about buzzwords or "branding" ourselves, but we definitely were branding ourselves for colleges even if we didn't call it that. It was incredibly stressful, TBH. More than college itself. Sounds like it's only gotten even more intense.

It's funny: the tech gold-rush didn't start until a couple years later, so our computer science class was actually a small, tight-knit group mostly free of people who were just trying to boost their college credentials. Everybody who was there wanted to be there, and we'd do extracurricular projects and even road-tripped to a programming competition once. It was really great.

I on the other hand was a total loser by age of 13.

Key takeaway one experience of no drugs no body fucking etc. . Can't appear to be total reality to one person and not others.

You don’t seem to be afflicted by the indeterminate side, which is good, but it also means this dissonance is not going away anytime soon: the majority of most of the institutions (read: 75% of <school>) that you’re trying to get in to are equally as determinate and character-forming as the one you find yourself in now.

They won’t challenge you to commit or reward you for vertical growth. Their communities will encourage you to seek out internships that will not challenge you or make you rounded, but are rather designed to “keep your options open”. When postsecondary graduation comes around, they will encourage you to pick a career path that matches those internships. It is very hard to escape those social pressures.

You have a good head on your shoulders and you should feel proud of that. Don’t let others’ anxieties be your own.

Odd how the perception among high schoolers differs from that of industry.

In the software engineering industry, CMU is considered top-tier, along with a few others probably not on this group’s radar like University of Washington.

Also, fwiw, Cornell is Ivy League too, and afaik Duke is considered effectively same tier as Ivy League.

You have IBM, Package Bell labs, Microsoft, Google - doing tech in general.

And then way out there researching neurolink fungi-based mesh materials: Carnegie-Mellon.

Having read it, I feel kinda stupid. My teens were all about just getting through HS, parties, bonfires and generally all sorts of stupid things you do as a kid. I did not think thoughts on the level of 'my generation'. That level of abstraction did not even occur to me.

I was just very lucky to have cohort full of very smart kids, so even with all HS drama, I managed to learn a lot.

I dunno. In a sense, we had it easier. Mistakes were not live streamed. At worst, they were remembered.

I do not envy the pressure teens feel today. Not participating in this at all risks missing out on a chance to 'stand out'.

Do a little more work up front, and you can do less/easier work for the same pay down the line. It was mainly a test of deferred gratification.

Now if you are lucky enough to get a good credential, your skids are still greased to some extent.

However I say that credentials used to be a shortcut because now the amount of work it takes to get a decent credential is way higher than it used to be. Is it really a shortcut if getting to the shortcut takes more work than just taking the more common path?

You can look at it from a supply-demand perspective. The easier path is the one with the same demand and less supply. Thirty years ago most people had still not caught on that credentials were the easier path. Now they have so credentials are no longer the easier path.

There is nothing intrinsic about any line of work that makes it always a better option than another. You have to weigh your personal preferences and the supply and demand for each job.

I remember in high school how powerful peer pressure was, but once you reach your late twenties none of that matters anymore.

In Texas, there's stuff like Stanford and Cornell, which is ivy league -- 1-2 kids might do that. Then we have 2 top tier state schools, then it's the other stuff.

Everyone else I work with got some degree from an Ivy League. Half have PhDs. It carries some weight and I think we get better VC funding and it's easier to get customers, but I don't think the degrees do much beyond that.

> 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.

This was college for me. I went to a tech university, not MIT but a good one. It was all about simultaneously impressing your professors and scoring internships with big-name tech companies. And the most driven, type-A of the whole lot? Women (of which there were few) and minorities (of which there were a lot). Don't mess with a Jersey kid from the 'hood when they have their eye on a job at Microsoft or Intel. Their lack of privilege only makes them hungrier.

I got tired of it -- and poor -- and eventually dropped out. Went to state school. There, the professors taught. I seemed to do much better, both academically and spiritually.

Louisiana has this amazing program called TOPS that pays 100% tuition for any in-state college, so most people take advantage of that and go to LA Tech, ULL, or LSU. Because of that, I had no admissions problems because even though those schools have incredibly good engineering programs (stupid hard course load and small classes with a high student to teacher ratio and very good chance of jobs and internships), the barrier to entry is pretty low and you just need a pretty average ACT score. The hardest barrier for most students (like most colleges) is room and board.

Like you mentioned, I think maybe 8% of my class was dating, only 2% probably smoked weed, a lot of people were into sports, music, and academics. However, STEM programs only showed up in my area a few years later (FIRST, Arduino stuff... etc). The schools which already had STEM programs had students which made great grades freshman year as they already had learned basic programming, electric circuits, and other engineering basics without having to learn everything from scratch like the rest of us.

I'm sure it's even more competitive now. Being a teenager in 2020 must be rough. I mean, in some ways it's a lot better (no WW2 or Vietnam clouding over you), but there are also no easy jobs leading to a house and car with 1 income.

Taken at face value I’d say stay steady, ‘tis a good path you’re on

In my high school class the students who got into Ivy Leagues were either legacy students or the ones that took as many AP classes as possible and had other activities to boost their resumes. (Without legacy, this was not a recipe for admission, but if you didn't do it then you wouldn't get in except in the most exceptional circumstances.)

Since band (and marching band) were not considered AP or Honors, some students had parents that would forbid them from taking these, as it would lower their weighted GPA.

I was a straight-A student for all four years in high school, but focused on the AP/Honors/community-college classes I was genuinely interested in (physics, math, computer science, etc.). Unlike many of my most competitive peers, I also made time for things I enjoyed that may not be the most appealing thing to colleges, like marching band and the computer programming club. I had a deep interest in computer programming, and had numerous side-projects to show for it. I also got a 36 on the ACT. I did not get accepted into any private school I applied to, but had my pick of top UC schools.

Would I do anything differently (perhaps take those extra APs, drop out of band, or focus more on artificially building up my resume) for that chance I might get into a more prestigious college?

I don't think so. My peers struggled with anxiety and depression, and school morale in general was laughably low. From my contact with friends who graduated after me, it appears the situation is only getting worse. Activities like marching band were the only things that kept me sane and their enrollment numbers are becoming anemic. Despite my attempt at having a balanced life, there were countless long nights filled with anxiety and stress as I worked to keep my GPA spotless.

My first semester in college was a relative breeze compared to high school, and many of my peers from high school agreed. But college can be as hard as you make it, so the next semester I doubled up on technicals and am on track to double major. I also got some great internship opportunities and a chance to do research. My high school math teacher would often tell worried students that college is what you make of it, and where you get in (or not) need not define who you are.

As for my future career, college names do mean a lot on resumes, but not getting into an Ivy League is not the end of the world. Recruiters still come to campus, and my friends at lower-ranked colleges have gotten internships at FAANG companies. I think the college name just dictates how much harder you have to work to be noticed by a recruiter.

But what exactly is the end goal in all this? A life in an insanely expensive area working long hours to stay to competitive? Is there another path? These are still questions I ask myself, and I don't think I have the answers. I suppose this is where each person needs to look deeply within and figure out what is best for them, and thank goodness I didn't lose sight of my real self in high school in order to build up an artificial resume. Some of my peers did, and immediately enrolled in the CS program despite having barely touched a computer program before college. I really hope they find what makes them happy, and don't get stuck in a career they hate. Perhaps someone a few years ahead of me can share some wisdom.

As the years have gone by I've realized two things:

1. The other behaviors are there, but they get filtered and harder to notice. Many of the situations you see in dramas are just...less dramatic, and more ordinary in real life. People don't want to bring it up, they want to stay in their routine, and when you have a ton of structure(as is the case in these schools) things move on too quickly to reflect on anything or become self-directed, so it gets repressed. The media version goes out of its way to highlight it, in contrast.

Many years after I graduated, the popular physics teacher at my high school was caught fooling around with the girls and doing favors for them. Apparently this had been going on for many years. You never would have known. He was a good teacher.

2. At a young age, even if you've encountered these things, you aren't necessarily sensitive enough to accurately judge what is happening to you or to others. Since teenagers struggle with this they start looking for easy ways to provide themselves with an identity - and media is happy to supply you with a stock identity that is, in rough approximation, true to you. But of course, they are all a mismatch on some level. And when young people socialize they are often prone to projecting on each other in an unhealthy way, drawing boundaries and defining characters out of thin air.

Which, if I were to turn that into advice, it would be: Stay focused on the ordinary stuff. Keep a diary so that when you notice something, it gets recorded and you can reflect on it and challenge it. It's the one thing that is most missing when you get caught up in feelings of urgency.

2 things: Don’t be fooled by the price of attendance, Rensselaer is a mid tier school.

Well said about exhibitionism as a pathology.

Doesn't align with my high school experience at all, where there were several pregnant girls and coke was commonplace.

Maybe each high school is just different?

With regards to smartphones, I find that I have almost the opposite experience. My high school has the same three tiers as yours: IB/AP, Honors, regular classes. I find that smartphone use is generally the same across classes, yet it is done more openly in regular classes, under the table in Honors, and in the IB/AP classes, they resort to using their smartwatches to type (generally because the IB/AP kids are richer, another bad part of high schools in the US).

Also, wow. Your school doesn't have anyone dating? In my school there are many carnal relationships among students who take the regular classes.

How is that kind of institutionalized sexism still legal?

I always wonder when people post these numbers about IQ going up and down over time, what scales are we talking about here? like is it a difference of like 2 IQ points or is it like a difference of 20? Cause if it's 5 or less I can't imagine it would make any real functional difference to the country.

Social isolation, anxiety, depression, mild cognitive impairment and avoidant behavior are all signs of untreated schizophrenia. It's possible in the past that those with sub-clinical schizotypal personalities self-medicated with tobacco. Removing that would result in a sub-segment of the population becoming significantly less functional in a pronounced way.

For us it was done the morning after being on a training exercise in the forest whole weekend with most being lucky if they have gotten more then 3h of sleep per night for the last 2 nights. Also a certain portion answer it badly on purpose (don't want to end in leadership/speciality stuff due to longer service time).

But yeah main thing the military is complaining about new recruits is physical fitness being down (a lot) and thus a lot flunking out and maybe again in a couple years (most of these get permanent "not fit for duty during peace time" after a couple rounds with the doctors over a decade or so)

Also the P1 test to some extent tests your test taking skills. Specifically the kind where you know how to quickly scan over the questions and pick the easiest ones and answer them first. It has a time limit and more questions then most in general can answer within of.

- My environment wasn't batshit crazy, my parents environment was. In part because of their class, in another part because of the time.

- They gave me advice that they couldn't get, like "don't smoke, don't do drugs, alcohol is bad for you in the long run, etc." Back then people simply didn't know, or didn't know well enough.

I'm sure I'd turn out like them if I'd have lived in their circumstances. The world is simply becoming a better place, and in part it's because around 1945 it was an awefully shitty one to such an extent that the world was still reeling from it in the seventies. I daresay that it takes 2 generations to smooth the sharpest of edges.

Disclaimer: armchair historian here.

I had my first daughter when I was 24 and now that I'm entering my prime earning years I don't have to worry about child care or being around 24/7 the same way I did when my kids were babies. I also have less "free time" now than when I was in college and I had way less than most college kids.

It sounds counterintutive in this day and age but I think having kids at the tail end of high school or early college might be the best way to do it.

The Baby Boomers criminalized and curtailed almost all the risk that made childhood and teenage years adventerous. I got to watch things getting systematically removed as I grew up. My brother is a few years older than me and we went through the same junior high. His experience including shop class, wrestling in gym, and dissecting a frog. Mine didn't.

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. Going on adventures & learning to resolve their own problems without a grownup hovering over them.

I think the issue is the proportion of adults with kids has declined, so parents run into non-parents all the time that don't enjoy seeing kids roaming around. Whereas when I was a kid, most adults were more understanding.

I mean this as much in a figurative sense as in a literal one.

Huh. Not saying this isn't true, but just sharing my experience:

I have never seen this. Instead, I've seen groups of teenagers trying to support and uplift each other.

Isn't this the stereotypical 'goth' group or such like? I reckon sad kids have always found other sad kids to cling together with.

Eh, not so much. By the time I cared to, I had communications outside of supervision.

Some tactics change, but every generation thinks they invented parental subversion. Hint: this means your parents are probably not as clueless as you think they are.

Steven Pinkers "Better Angels of our Nature" attempts yo highlight many of the reasons we are less violent today.

I think poor behavior is often mitigated by the same factors.

What? Yeah, sure, it's easier to open a tab and google something than to get a book from the public library, but I don't think that's what's stopped people from learning about the past.

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 cancer and no one I know in younger generation uses it. I think they are exposed to a lot more information and their parents or schools are unable to help them process it.

Kids are uncertain, worried about things their parents can't relate with. Imagine feeling down because your online account got bullied by other adults on reddit because you expressed a perfectly normal but dumb opinion. People don't think about age when they are typing a response online, they just think the other person ought to have "common sense".

Few are forced into linkedin/other cancer and build online presence because they think it will lead them to more opportunities and they are probably not wrong. Various recruitment agencies seems to have gone fully online with social media/email spam.

Twitter is not healthy for a teenager. Linkedin may not be either (I saw some insane CEO posts). I mean, to give you something to compare. Have you seen marketing posts with misleading titles such as $100 and 6 months for a 3000% return on customer acquisition? (Which turned out to be fraud and fabricated). Huge amount of fabrication in their idols now. They cling to youtubers, Elon Musk, and all the exceptions. Their feed is full of them while seemingly their irl interaction is less than ideal.

Some will have a distorted view due to huge differences in the life they live online and people they interact with. Previously, it was less visible as people tend to live in the same economic class neighborhoods.

They will know about all the countries with things they can't have in their own. They will be more aware of it but they lack any political power and position to change things affecting them.

Surveillance is pushed on them involuntarily which tends to change their behaviour and normalize a specific corporate personality over time. Compare that to being in open office or public speaking 24/7 of your life.

Misinformation is pushed from top to bottom instead. I think it was always like that but now kids are more aware, they will feel remorseful and insignificant if they can't do anything. Imagine having parents believing insane rumours on Facebook and stopping you from getting vaccinated. I haven't seen many kids who are anti vaxxers but I have seen enough adults.

1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exam_(2009_film)

I could imagine that "Eighth Grade" would come up a lot if kids at that age answered.

Eventually the music died along with the organising capability. Nowadays there are organised festivals with security, laws to obey and profits to make. Kids go to these proper events as spectators rather than participants. There is nothing subversive about it.

The culture that went with the rave party scene in the UK was a reaction to the Thatcher government. Temporary autonomous party zones where the police were powerless were wonderfully exciting. Today I don't stumble across the equivalent scene when travelling at night. There is no equivalent going on, young people are just not having the same fun. It is consumer capitalism all the way.

The anomie that teenagers experience is a result of them having nothing meaningful to do. Those that have meaningful work to do, even in their education, don't suffer nearly such teenage angst, and are much happier for it in both the short and long term.

- concerned teenager

That's not to say that some friction isn't required for stability.

So the pressure is there because the pressure is actually there in real life. Who can afford to take chances when a medical bill can ruin your family’s chances at having a stable future?

I think you're just out of touch.

I'm sorry, but no one thinks about their grandparents' generation or stuff from their generation. Literally nobody cares. Odd that you think that people do.

"Vapid millenials"? Seriously? Sounds a bit like those NYT opinion pieces about Millennials written by confused boomers.

I presume you're not a fan of lofi? K-pop? Dubstep? Video game soundtracks, in general?

There's also an element here of how people express their tastes: Now a days, everyone has infinite access on Spotify/Youtube/Apple music. So I would say that music has become very decentralized. Anyone can put something on Soundcloud or Bandcamp, and anyone can listen to it. So the label of "pop" is maybe not as descriptive as it could be.

> No Cool behavior

I want to say something sardonic and rude like "So what, like smoking and getting pregnant as teenagers and raping people?" But I literally have no idea what you mean by cool behavior, and that's what my mind goes to when you say "cool". What do you really mean when you say "cool behavior"?

> no new anything

What do you think of twitch.tv? Or Esports? I presume your thoughts are not positive?