I wanted a license to drive in 1990. Driving in the sf bay area was still fun and you could get about.
Now driving is not fun. Super fucking expensive, mucho traffic and there are vanishly rare 3rd locations to drive to.
It's the assholes my age who decided stranger danger and road hazards must be addressed by all parents now driving kids to k-12. Now that one is used to carting them about what's an extra trip to drop them at a friends?
I also didn't have sex in hs. Not sure why this (always morphing) ideal hs experience is held up as a life goal.
One salient question is: are all those delays in risky or "adult" behavior a sign of a general delay in attaining emotional maturity and/or a sense of autonomy and agency in the world? I do regularly read folks who teach teenagers saying they think the teens are less mature and agentic than they used to be. Arnold Kling was the most recent example, I think-- his catchphrase is "17 is the new 15".
It's hard to tell whether these claims are valid because there's no good metric, unlike for the possibly-correlated risky behaviors. But if it's true, it seems bad despite the lowered risks. This is partly intuition about what makes for a flourishing life but also partly because some of the risks will just shift, e.g. teens being bad at driving is probably more about their inexperience than their age, so learning to drive at 21 will just make you a bad 21-year-old driver. And surely to *some* extent that's true for sex as well: it takes practice no matter when you start.
Certainly more opportunity to work and less helicopter-monitoring by parents would be worthwhile to shore up teens' agency and maturity. And I'd expect an NRO article written by a military vet on this topic to sing the praises of enlistment or advocate mandatory national service or some such-- they're really falling down on the authoritarian job. :) But there's probably also a connection here to Brink Lindsey's thesis that the institutional arrangements of modern society make it harder for everybody to be agentic, and to Tanner Greer's meditations on the decline of self-government; you'd expect those kinds of changes to hit younger people first and hardest.
I wanted a license to drive in 1990. Driving in the sf bay area was still fun and you could get about.
Now driving is not fun. Super fucking expensive, mucho traffic and there are vanishly rare 3rd locations to drive to.
It's the assholes my age who decided stranger danger and road hazards must be addressed by all parents now driving kids to k-12. Now that one is used to carting them about what's an extra trip to drop them at a friends?
I also didn't have sex in hs. Not sure why this (always morphing) ideal hs experience is held up as a life goal.
That article is fucking bullshit.
One salient question is: are all those delays in risky or "adult" behavior a sign of a general delay in attaining emotional maturity and/or a sense of autonomy and agency in the world? I do regularly read folks who teach teenagers saying they think the teens are less mature and agentic than they used to be. Arnold Kling was the most recent example, I think-- his catchphrase is "17 is the new 15".
It's hard to tell whether these claims are valid because there's no good metric, unlike for the possibly-correlated risky behaviors. But if it's true, it seems bad despite the lowered risks. This is partly intuition about what makes for a flourishing life but also partly because some of the risks will just shift, e.g. teens being bad at driving is probably more about their inexperience than their age, so learning to drive at 21 will just make you a bad 21-year-old driver. And surely to *some* extent that's true for sex as well: it takes practice no matter when you start.
Certainly more opportunity to work and less helicopter-monitoring by parents would be worthwhile to shore up teens' agency and maturity. And I'd expect an NRO article written by a military vet on this topic to sing the praises of enlistment or advocate mandatory national service or some such-- they're really falling down on the authoritarian job. :) But there's probably also a connection here to Brink Lindsey's thesis that the institutional arrangements of modern society make it harder for everybody to be agentic, and to Tanner Greer's meditations on the decline of self-government; you'd expect those kinds of changes to hit younger people first and hardest.