“We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact.“
In the TV/movie days, the dream of being a star was also there for many, but it was also so obviously out of reach that only the most daring and talented even attempted it.
The difference with your generation is that everyone grew up with a movie studio in their pocket, and watching YouTube makes everyone think that being a star is a real possibility. For some it will work out, and talent may be discovered that otherwise wouldn’t have been, but that vast majority will have to come to terms with the cold really that work is actually work, same as everyone else.
It is possible to find something you like that also pays well (most tech people here probably got here that way), but it does mean that you need to do the “hard things” early in life. Figuring out how Linux or Rust works is far less fun at the beginning, and you need to make a real effort to pull away from social media and video games to focus on things like that. I suspect it’s much harder today than it was 15 years ago.
He may well find it satisfying and/or enjoyable. But it appears to be some kind of severe workaholism he has, and I'd speculate there is a 50% chance football owns him, not the other way around. It would be fun to be him for just one Sunday though right???
The common view we have of teenagers, as devoid of any agency, vastly underestimates them, not only that, it excludes them for the "res publica": the participation to the public life, exclusion that emerges then as lack of maturity. All the acting out and "teenage angst", it is my opinion, is actually a call for responsibility and participation, and it is by this participation, and the subsequent confrontation with the messy reality of life that make you realize your limitation and allows you to grow out of your childish dream if they are, indeed, childing. This dampening of expectations is not a negative thing: it's what has allowed civilization to go on: almost nobody wanted to be a farmer. Keeping the door open for the odd wind of luck while living a pragmatic, if not as colorful as one's fantasies, life is the more realistic and healthy way of organize one future while the "think about this later" is a recipe for regret and depression caused by the mismatch between what it is and what I wished it were.
Or whether you have to have health insurance. If having health insurance wasn't tied to employment, just think of the opportunities that could open up.
You can do something you don't care for without making it your life.
"I have to wonder then whether, over many eons, we've evolved the risk appetite required to explore options - i.e. in exploration of new food sources. However, while I would argue that such risk appetite is a superior trait for populations, it may be of net negative value for any particular individual singled out of a population. Because, while a roaring success may benefit that individual as well as the population around him, say, if (s)he found a new food source and also could control its public distribution for his/her benefit, it could also turn out that the exploration fails, and the individual perishes from exposure to whatever risky environment in which he placed himself in the first place. So, extrapolated over many generations of natural selection, this successively repeated scenario would breed individuals into risky-options-seeking automatons, who don't necessarily do so on the net likelihood of their own benefit. In a large population of such risky-options-seekers, some would inevitably succeed, improving the lot of the population, but those that failed would be crossed off the natural selection list, even though the same traits were being exercised in survivors and non-survivors alike.
So when it comes to the value of risky-options on the individual basis, I would argue that the jury's still out, and that economic conservatism may be the individual's value maximizing choice after all . . ."
https://walkabout165.blogspot.com/2010/05/its-all-optional.h... (There's context provided in the post).
I probably have some interim updated thoughts about this twelve years on, but nothing conclusive.
There is value in being granted the freedom to fail, and even smart risks require a chance of failure; that's why banks and investors exist as they do. The difference is that a teenage individual is far worse at analyzing risk and the consequences of failure while having almost absolute authority over their own direction.
http://www.cs.uni.edu/%7Ewallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2018...
(and a HN thread on that article form a bit ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26209541 )