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Comment by yoz-y | Hacker News Reader

I know that angst you teen is a trope but where I was most teens were quite happy. School ends early, plenty of time and zero responsibilities. You can just spend most of time loitering. Also hangover passes super quickly so you don’t waste a whole day after a party.

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> but where I was most teens were quite happy. School ends early, plenty of time and zero responsibilities.

That's the kind of thing that seems happy in retrospect, though. Kids don't appreciate many of the benefits of youth until they've lost it, and until then, small dramas and angst can often have an exaggerated significance.

There's been some fMRI work done on this[1]: if you pose various moral dilemmas to adults and teens under fMRI, they'll give you similar answers. But: teens have dramatically higher frontal cortex activation then adults do while giving the answer.

Frontal cortex is associated with high level reasoning: the interpretation is that while teenagers are able to resolve the same sorts of issues as adults, they're spending a lot more mental effort to do so - it's taxing. Hence the phenomenon of teenagers tending to oscillate between "mature and capable" and "complete breakdown" when the stress gets dialed up (not that this doesn't happen to adults, but relatively we handle more better).

Not unsurprisingly, the frontal cortex is also one of the last regions of the brain to undergo maturation: the neural remodel you get at the onset of puberty starts from the back of the brain and moves forward.

In short: adults take an observation of adult-like behavior at face value and presume it implies adult-experiential reasoning, then get surprised and angry when the environmental stresses suddenly collapse the entire facade.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2788780/

I got severe hangovers anytime I drank when I was 16-22. I avoided alcohol for years and was surprised when I tried it again around 32 that I have to drink truly excessive amounts of alcohol to experience a hangover, and even then, it seems to be mainly dehydration.

I’m not so sure about the “zero responsibilities” statement, either. If I didn’t do my homework for certain classes I would be punished with something similar to solitary confinement.

> You can just spend most of time loitering. Also hangover passes super quickly so you don’t waste a whole day after a party.

I started work at 15, so no responsibility-less loitering for me. And those hangovers can only happen if you save up enough cash after paying for school lunch and car insurance, which the 6-month cost was about the same as the price of my car $1000.

My guess is that the "happy" sample size came from the Kardashian/Jenner family. Given that they have a lot to lose here, I would think, as well.

And yes, I technically got "free" lunch, but do you want to be in THAT line? I mean, the cool kids are in the subway and burger line for a bargain of $6 a lunch... So why wouldn't I do that, too?

Thank goodness I didn't have an incessant window into all their lives outside of school, while I was working 30-40 hour weeks at 7/hr.

Hence the “where I lived qualification”, which was btw 90’s in Eastern Europe. People around usually had two working parents and no need to have jobs themselves. Of course nobody except a fiend who regularly “borrowed” their parents’ car had one (since you can drive only at 18 here).

I can definitely see that if you hoist adult responsibilities on kids it’s super stressful, but that is not normal everywhere.

I work since grade 6... last free years were in elemntary school. No money or time for drinking, advanced classes take extra time and work the rest plus some school clubs for building resume to get better college entrances. Teens years are not always without responsibility and with free time, children have been working since millenia past, idea that children must be carefree is a new thing and not true.

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