Comment by rconti
1 year ago
> 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.
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.
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).
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> 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.
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.