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Comment by labrador | Hacker News Reader

The person who wrote this, Rob Henderson, is young to me. He looks to be in his late 30's, early 40's so he is starting the transition from young to old. It's appropriate to care what young people think at his age because it's good that parents care about what their teenagers think.

Now that I'm in my 60's I'm aware that I don't know what young people think because they have grown up in a completely different environment than me. I had long periods of quiet as a child where I had to entertain myself and if I wanted to engage with friends I had to wait for school. I can't imagine growing up in an always connected world with an overload of entertainment distractions. I'm pretty sure I would think differently if I had.

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I was having a conversation with someone around my age about remote work and young workers. I made the comment that I couldn't have imagined graduating from school and not having an office to go into--though I'd have appreciated an office with more flexibility around commuting.

My friend's response--which I certainly agree with--is that in addition to the changes in technology (I didn't even have non-internal email and that was fairly advanced for the time) younger people are just a lot more used to living to a significant degree in a digital environment than we were.

And, yes, as a child I lived in a fairly rural environment without neighbors so didn't really do much in the way of socializing outside of school.

30 year old male. Everyone I know does hard drugs. I don't have friends.

Sounds rough... I work and deal with a lot of 20 years olds and I find them quite dry, restrained and conservative to what I was doing at their age. Could be a regional thing?

There's the fentanyl class and the PMC class, and the two rarely meet

Off track a little, but 30s and 40s isn't old IMO. 60 and over IMO is what is classed as old or mature or whatever people want to call it.. I would say 30 to 59 is middle aged or what ever modern term is used these days. Under 30 is young.

Might be simple, but I definitely don't consider 30s old

The title is 'adults' though, not 'old people'. Those in their 30s are definitely adults.

To me it's clear that even 'young people' as used throughout the article is intended as euphemism for 'children' (i.e. non-adults) that's perceived to be less condescending. (Perhaps the author cares too much what children think!)

> It's appropriate to care what young people think at his age because it's good that parents care about what their teenagers think.

Why? You should be kind to your teenagers the same as you’re kind to your toddler. But they’re ur-humans whose brains won’t be fully developed for another decade. They have little to teach you, but you have lots to teach them. After all, you’ve been in their shoes but they haven’t been in your’s.

> Why?

Because teenagers can go off the rails pretty quickly if you're not paying attention to what they think. They could be influenced by a malicious peer or get caught up in some thought cloud which you know is damaging and dangerous. Teenagers are susceptible to social contagions, like self-harm or suicide.

I think teenagers have a lot to learn that we can only teach in theory or with fundamentals. Once they figure it out, we can learn from them.

I never grew up in a world where:

- we had ‘hide from an armed attacker’ drills in school.

- what I said as a 16 year old could jeopardize my career a dozen plus years later (thank god Usenet is dead.)

- marijuana was considered genuinely harmless and pseudo-legal.

- getting a ~5.0 weighted GPA and perfect SAT scores wasn’t enough to get you into any state school.

- even the most chaste kids are desensitized to porn as teenagers

Marijuana affects brain development in teenagers. Just FYI.

Did you think I was suggesting it didn’t?

I have learned a lot from my kids. They have their own personalities and perspectives to contribute, and the world today is different than when I was a kid. They are not really at all like a blank program that you just need to run through the same boot up procedure that you went through. At least in my opinion.

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