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Comment by orthecreedence | Hacker News Reader

> I don't blame the kids, they don't know any better. They've spent their whole life focusing on the next goal.

No, they spent their whole lives being sheltered. Let's call it what it is. These people were on tracks because they were put on tracks from a young age and told that the track leads somewhere, and any questioning of the tracks was often met with a harsh rebuke. They didn't play outside with the neighborhood kids, they were at soccer practice. They didn't get a summer job at a shitty fast food joint, they were doing summer school or learning piano. Everything they've done from start to finish has been curated. Of course when the track ends abruptly it's catastrophic.

Independence, curiosity, and self-quesitoning and awareness are often not taught because "getting ahead" is more important.

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I think you're assuming way too much.

From my observations, having low parental involvement and excessively unstructured upbringing doesn't automatically produce determined and self-directed adults. From my familiarity with several small towns, I would actually say it does the opposite. I can think of many people I knew as a kid who ended up stuck in small towns at dead-end jobs simply because inertia was the only thing they knew. Nobody ever jumped into their lives to push them to try different things or explore paths that weren't sitting right in front of them.

I couldn't agree more. Parental guidance or lack thereof can work differently for different people. There are incompetent and more competent parents everywhere. But that is beside the point. You can do better now. You can start steering your own ship. That degree you were pushed to get might come in handy or not.

> From my observations, having low parental involvement and excessively unstructured upbringing doesn't automatically produce determined and self-directed adults.

Sample of one, it indeed didn't. However being knocked around did help with being somewhat more ready and open to new things and uncharted territories. It also dramatically reduces the fear of the unknown and can be a significant confidence booster.

> These people were on tracks because they were put on tracks from a young age and told that the track leads somewhere, and any questioning of the tracks was often met with a harsh rebuke. They didn't play outside with the neighborhood kids, they were at soccer practice. They didn't get a summer job at a shitty fast food joint, they were doing summer school or learning piano. Everything they've done from start to finish has been curated. Of course when the track ends abruptly it's catastrophic.

It's not clear to me how the "tracks" were significantly different in, say, the past 80 years, at least in America. Compulsory schooling has been a thing for a long time. Getting an after school job delivering newspapers so you have a little spending money is not exactly a clever endeavor, and it's not clear to me you learn more life skills than you do having to manage homework (for example).

Get married to someone of the opposite gender, go to church every sunday, have kids. Work a job with a pension for 30 years, retire with a gold watch. (or the blue collar equivalent). Those are tracks.

I don't disagree with the premise that kids are more coddled today than they used to be, but the "tracks" metaphor is, if anything, less valid now than ever. There is more choice, and less stability, as far as I can tell.

You learn quite a lot by working a regular job and getting a paycheck as a kid. It is utterly baffling that there are some kids graduating college that never worked a regular job. It's a problem that young kids in our modern world don't seem to even want to get jobs.

As far as I'm concerned, you are basically mentally stunted if you didn't work for pay in your teenage years.

> As far as I'm concerned, you are basically mentally stunted if you didn't work for pay in your teenage years.

I worked a teenage job, too. Physical labor.

It was a learning experience, but I don’t see it as this life changing pivot point that separated me from others. In fact, you meet plenty of people at a physical labor job like that who are clearly not on a path to being ahead of their peers, or who have been doing the same work for decades since they were a teenager.

I also know plenty of people who didn’t have any jobs until they graduated college and they turned out fine.

I think some of the lofty claims about teenage jobs being life changing or how teens who don’t get jobs are “mentally stunted” are getting absurd.

It reads like people who have developed a chip on their shoulder about their own upbringings being superior to others because they were more difficult.

> In fact, you meet plenty of people at a physical labor job like that who are clearly not on a path to being ahead of their peers, or who have been doing the same work for decades since they were a teenager.

At least for me, the experience of doing physical labor alongside people like that as a teenager was a real eye-opener. It showed me exactly what my life might look like if I didn't focus and work toward my goals. That was already my plan, but seeing the alternative first hand was pretty motivating nonetheless (and frightening).

imo this is what good parenting should be about regardless of one’s class or upbringing.

It’s good to show kids which possible “doors” they can go down in life. It’s easy to claim that door X is better than door Y, but unless you have them _see_ the difference, or at least talk to someone that’s been through door Y, they won’t believe you.

There’s nothing wrong with focusing on a difficult track! But if you grow up to be an adult that doesn’t comprehend how a normal person lives, then you’ve got a problem lol.

Yep. 17 year old me working alongside a 70 year old dude working the same job as me... I knew that's not what I wanted for my life.

That said, I think I've still wafted through life on tracks. I just concluded that FAANG was the next track after uni so I made it happen. Not sure I'm happy any more though. Maybe I need to reinvent myself.

> It's a problem that young kids in our modern world don't seem to even want to get jobs.

Literally nobody wants a job. You do it to get money. People want to do something and not be bored, but that's got nothing to do with jobs.

Delayed adulthood is a real thing. Even 25 years ago many/most high school kids have after school and/or summer jobs. Now it is almost unheard of.

Their entire young lives are structured, parentally planned and resume padding. Then theres stuff like college admission consultants which have become very normalized, with allegedly 26% of parents hiring them per some study.

I worked from 14, had a crappy retail job throughout high school and my college prep was the $20 Kaplan CD lol. Whatever sports I played were the $50/season local league your parents drop you off at a couple nights a week. And my parents weren't poor, they were totally normal upper middle class low 6 figure earnings.

Nowadays the above is akin to smoking on an airplane with a baby in your lap.

Eh there are certainly some parents like that. Most of the ones I know aren’t, though - they’re still mostly of the local league variety. We never brought a car seat into an airplane, laughable security theater.

There’s also a big push to not provide kids with smartphones until high school.

Our parent groups might just be weird, though.

One reason is because people believe the trope you said: ” Get married to someone of the opposite gender, go to church every sunday, have kids. Work a job with a pension for 30 years, retire with a gold watch. (or the blue collar equivalent). Those are tracks.”

Sans the watch, we know that grafting onto community while accomplishing the statistically most meaningful tasks (per all psychological studies) opens all the doors to a content life full of more paths than can be explored before this short life is over.

But yeah, how they got where they were was never the point. The point was now you know. Now you understand you've been chasing a goal you never knew about. It is time to stop. Start thinking for yourself. Start steering the wheel. Stop drifting.

Those other things you mention are also "tracks". Getting a shitty fast food job is done not due to any kind of aspiration but simply because it's the default thing to do.

Imagine not being able to get a shitty fast food job because you are disabled. Or just moved to the US and speak too weird and don't have anyone to vouch for you.

Ditto for hanging out with the neighborhood kids. This assumes that you are one of them, and not a victim/target for them.

What a strange response. Anything is a track if you only do that one thing. The point is that having diverse life experiences that challenge you make you a much more well-rounded person that can adapt and handle difficult situations.

Well, I think people like you are strange: how weird would it be to go through life assuming that everyone thinks the same way as you!

How is working at McD's more "diverse" than playing soccer, or even tinkering with a computer at home? It's only "better" in a very specific value system, that of the American lower middle class

Or put differently: the cliche thing that every teenager does in every American movie is "diverse"? How?

Going outside and playing with other kids is "diverse" because it's unstructured time. What do you do with the time? It's up to you to decide. Do you build a fort? Egg cars? Sell plants? It's an activity that requires some amount of creativity, and it's outside the normal zone of operation (home/school/etc). The only reason I could see this as a negative is if you wish your children to grow up as cogs and automatons who are unable to think for themselves and find their own place within social structures.

As far as getting a job, I have to say it benefited me quite a bit. I was already tinkering at home (I've been programming since I was 8) but getting a job before I left home did many things for me. I got to see how things are for a lot of people in the world around me. Some people need this shitty job. I was lucky enough to be able to do it because my parents mandated it, not because I needed to make ends meet. That gave me an enormous amount of perspective and humility. "This is how things could be for you." It gave me the drive to want to do better than working in fast food, and it gave me compassion for the people who are in that situation. Compassion that, to be frank, a lot of people I've met who have not done customer service or shitty jobs lack quite a bit. Secondly, I had to get that job myself. My parents didn't pull strings, they made me go out into the world, do applications, "sell" myself, etc. It was a growth experience. The world isn't going to bend to your whim, you are going to have to do things you don't like, and you are going to have to compromise.

TL;DR: playing outside: independence + creativity. Job: independence + compromise + humility + compassion.

None of that you learn by doing homework.

> Getting a shitty fast food job is done not due to any kind of aspiration but simply because it's the default thing to do.

This is the kind of "tracks" I'm most familiar with: Especially in small towns where ideas like individual freedoms, bucking the trend, and turning your nose up at higher education are common, you don't see it translating to a lot of success in life. You see it trapping people in cycles of poverty and dead-end jobs.

??? I got a job as a teenager because I wanted to buy a guitar. It had nothing to do with tracks. It's the same for most teens, they want to make a few extra bucks. Let's not forgot the majority of people on this forum were on a track of sorts that differs very much from the rest of the population. Being a bright nerdy kid is not the norm. Teens got jobs and mowed lawns to buy a car, weed, a guitar, etc, not to pad their highschool resume. That is not the norm unless you're at an expensive private school or already in the upper middle class or something.

> Imagine not being able to get a shitty fast food job because ... Or just moved to the US and speak too weird and don't have anyone to vouch for you.

You've obviously never worked food.

These changes only occurred due to the dual income trap though.

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