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Comment by ghssds | Hacker News Reader

What happens to asshole kids? Do they become regular adults or asshole adults? Do they become soldiers or prisonners never to be seen again by normies? Do they even reach adulthood? Are they even a stable group or were we all asshole kids to some other kids?

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Dunno, maybe all of the above? Believe it or not, I didn't really keep in touch with them.

My point was that kids are disproportionately likely to treat other kids badly, especially when adults aren't around. That kind of situation is common at school, but much less common at home, unless the parents choose to allow it.

I think it's an important development milestone to learn that people don't want to be their friends, and the longing for human connection might be a good moderating force in their life. I was a really pessimistic teenager, which I received plenty of feedback on, and have worked against my own nature to become a more positive and cheery adult.

This is a strange claim.

In my personal experience, the asshole kids overlapped greatly with the popular kids in a Venn diagram sense. People, in general, did want to be their friends.

I think that a lot of the assholes behaved that way because they were naturally charismatic and people wanted to be their friends despite their being assholes. They were never socially punished for their behavior because they could turn on the charm at will. In other words, they were assholes because they could afford to be.

In my experience they become regular adults. Whatever made them an asshole is still there, but they've either learned to deal with it or the context has changed such that there's no point in being that kind of asshole anymore. Nobody's perfect, and adolescence is rough in the best of times.

Some become President of the United States. Others probably grow out of it?

Looking back at the assholes of my youth, they run the gamut. Some seem like lovely adults, and are very successful. Some are just like they were and are very successful. Some others crashed out completely. The more brash, upfront assholes and the clever assholes seem to have done better than the sneering, malicious assholes.

And we were (almost) all assholes sometimes, but there's definitely a class of kids who were assholes most of the time.

> Do they become soldiers or prisonners never to be seen again by normies?

Not necessarily those two exact options, but yes. Adults are free to self-segregate. Even in K–12, once the option for tracking into advanced classes is available, everyone's social lives improve.

The ones from my school mostly became good for nothing's or went to jail.

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