My high school was horribly inefficient, in other words, which ended up being stressful. I gather this is the norm. Meanwhile adults were telling me those were the best years of my life—I mean I wasn't really bullied and had a pretty decent high school experience and now that I'm older I sorta get what they meant but god damn, if that'd actually been true I should have offed myself. The "real world", and college, are easier than high school, which was difficult mostly because it was both hyper-authoritarian and wasted phenomenal amounts of time.
I'd suggest based on empirical evidence most people in the tech world are more apt to flower later. So for some, their peak was at high school or college - for most of us, I suspect its early to mid thirties.
So, all, told, I was working _80 hours a week, minimum_ in my high school years. I graduated top ten in my class, and my parents were astonished that I took two years off between high school and college going to a technical school eight hours a week with a 40 hour a week job. I had cut 32 hours of work a week out of my week, and I was only 19!
When I finally did go to college, the weeks during the semester were about twenty hours a week between classes, studying, projects, and tutoring and a twenty hour a week part time job. I can understand why you felt like college was a vacation because I felt the same way!
The downside to all of this is that I was very poorly socialized, compared to some of my peers, when I started college. Luckily, since I had a bunch of free time, it was easy to catch up, but the first semester was difficult for me navigating all of these unstructured, unsupervised socialization opportunities. A part of me regrets that because that stunted my ability to network from the start of college - I have no idea what opportunities I have missed out on and will miss out on in the future as a result.
Several people that graduated in that top ten with me who had the same 80 hour a week work week in high school could not handle the unstructured free time in college. Two dropped out of college but have none-the-less worked their way into lives that seem to make them happy, one got heavily into drugs and is still in jail, one committed suicide, and the rest graduated and seem to have kept on the track.
The obvious question is whether weedout regimens actually burnish skills. In my experience they did to some extent, but most of the effort expended was game-playing to get onto a path which would be easier or more lucrative in the long run. (Example: becoming a medical doctor or tenured professor is harder than it has to be because people are attracted by the prospect of a job-for-life.)
It's pretty frustrating to bust your hump in high school to get a leg up on college work and then be stuck in the same class as the mouth breathers who just coasted by in high school and completely bored.
But yeah, coulda CLEP'd out of at least a year of college if I'd known better. No-one told me that and I didn't figure it out until it was too late. Never even occurred to me that I could knock out all those credit hours on the cheap with some very, very light studying over a summer. I mean college is supposed to be really hard, right, otherwise what's the point? eyeroll
This is one of most baffling aspects about the US, that is that you can have classrooms with no windows. I didn’t personally grow up as a kid in the best social-economic regime (an Eastern-European communist country in the ‘80s) but fortunately for little kid me the regime’s architects and urban planners put great emphasis on all classrooms having lots of windows, as big as possible. I later in my life became quite interested in the history of architecture and urban planning and I was able to find this idea (i.e. big windows are good for schools) in architectural magazines published way back in the 1950s.
I suspect that's a natural consequence of good people being held down in poverty by tyrannical government.
My view on social media and parents giving smartphones to kids is the primary reason. When kids start overusing phones and digital world, everything seems binary, they can feel like they can control people in real-world as if thy do a 3d character in their latest game. And can get depressed when others don't behave as they intend to. A friend becomes a removable entity in a list or circle(google+) they can add or pluck out anytime, without considering the emotional factor others feel. I can talk on this topic whole day, i believe kids don'e need smartphones etc. and I will never bring my kids near them at-least till they reach their teen years.
I've talked to Canadian kids who, when caught using steroids, have said that their performance on the field was part of their entrance plan. They had consciously decided to take drugs not to become pro athletes, or even to win a scholarship, but simply to get into a proper university. Similarly, I haven't heard of many indian students taking "learning drugs". I heard an ivy league admissions person talk about the sports thing. She spoke of a boarderline case involving an athlete who had competed at the Olympics. He had failed to medal. THAT was part of the schools decision, whether they metaled or not actually mattered.
For people who burn out in high school, that's usually your first experience with it. The first time is always the worst, whether it happens in high school, college, or on the job.
Once you've already burned out once in high school, twice in college (once before and once after switching your major), and hit your breaking point at a job or two (regardless of whether you switch jobs, or careers, or just take a long vacation, or just spend six months kind of just putting in time at your job before you're ready to really try again) ... well, burning out still sucks, but you kind of get used to it, you know how to deal with it, and you know that eventually you're going to pick yourself up again.
But man, that first time, you really feel like a failure, like you're never going to amount to anything, and like you'll never be able to try again.
Of course even then it's a total crapshoot, but there's very little chance of that panning out in the state school.
I wonder how the math works out on that. Realistically, I would only think so many connections could be made at such high levels for any given class of students.
Can you please point out the schools giving away A’s? My high school and the colleges I attended were certainly not that way. Not even remotely. I’m going to get a masters soon and I want to go to this type of school.
There are hundreds of millions of people around the world who's parents are spending their life savings to send them to a broken down public school, and anything short of an A+ means abject poverty (I mean real poverty, not the American "I can't afford my iPhone bill poverty") for another generation of their family name. My dad is the only person in his small shanty town who made it out, and he studied 16 hours a day, 7 days a week - all to achieve a decent middle class salary and drive a Toyota Camry. I was an exceptionally gifted student thanks to him, graduated at the top of my class, and now, again, barely eek out a middle class life
Not to mention the societal aspect - in many Asian cultures anything short of an A and you're an abject societal failure and a generational disgrace. Western-raised people don't have a clue what that kind of pressure feels like.
Anyone who thinks American schools are stressful are completely delusional about how the rest of the world works. Americans have had life too easy for too long - depression is simply a symptom of an overly easy life. It's the same reason depression & mental health issues overly present in zoo animals.
Suffering and struggle are necessary for a fulfilling, happy life - the West hasn't been exposed to real suffering in over half a century.
That sounds more like pain, not stress. If you (or the you at the time, which is an important difference) can easily externalize your problem—i.e. blame the school for being stupidly strict, rather than blame yourself for not living up to its standard—then as much as it might be an ordeal to go through, it won’t really affect your psyche.
The concern here isn’t that school is harder; the concern is that school (and the way parents talk to children about school) is being treated with more seriousness than it deserves, and so the potential of failure at school is being seen—at least on average—as more of a personal, moral failing, an automatic source of shame.
Of course, children always treated some school environments this way—mostly high-cost private schools, intensely-competitive academic schools, and military academies. But this attitude seems to be spreading to all schools, and that’s a bit concerning.
One person's suffering doesn't diminish or invalidate the suffering of someone else.
It's actually hilarious to me that you think this could possibly be true.
And to be clear, we're talking about an educated person with a relatively successful life. But the expectation that real life follows "Hollywood" is still there. I started to doubt that everybody is able to draw a clear line between reality and fiction as long as they bask in that fiction for too long or at key moments in life.
Reducing access to means and methods is the best way prevent suicide, and that includes physical security around frequently used locations, especially if they involve trains or high places.
There's often a strong resistance to this and I don't understand why.
See this rather old English government advice: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
(See in particular case study 2 and case study 3 on pages 22 and 25)
There's often a strong resistance to
this and I don't understand why.
[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nyu-bobst-library-suicides-al...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWPEVhrWZS0
Start at 6:50 for reducing access to means and methods.
It's a very important part, and you must have reducing access to means and methods if you want to reduce the numbers of people killing themselves.
>Anderson points to another example where simply making a change in people's access to instruments of suicide dramatically lowered the suicide rate. In England, death by asphyxiation from breathing oven fumes had accounted for roughly half of all suicides up until the 1970s, when Britain began converting ovens from coal gas, which contains lots of carbon monoxide, to natural gas, which has almost none. During that time, suicides plummeted roughly 30 percent — and the numbers haven't changed since.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/10/health/blocking-the-paths...
With that in mind, I can easily see how things like fences might make the problem worse as you said. People will feel even more trapped and helpless when what they need is the opposite.
I didn't say this (because I thought it was obvious) but installing fences is not meant to make people happier. It's meant to reduce access to means and methods. This is part, but only part, of preventing suicide.
It's a very important part, and it's the bit that we have best evidence for.
In the short term it's the bit that has most impact.
That's not what the post you replied to was saying. The worry is that being "fenced in" would actively make people less happy.
I'm sure you're already aware of this, but condescendingly stating that you're being polite is the opposite of being polite.
> we know fences work.
No, you don't know that.
You may know they solve the visible problem (suicide), but you don't know if they do anything to alleviate the conditions that lead to suicide.
Is there anyone who believes fences make people happier or less depressed?
I've never claimed that the only thing we need to do is install fences.
When you introduce business-like accountability, you need a way to “stack rank” your resources. This process alone is misguided — not all public schools have the same mission, so whatever criteria you come up with removes control of that mission from the local level — and has a lot of second-order consequences.
Even in business, all this heavy measurement and reporting causes a ton of overhead — and in schools, this takes the form of standardized testing. This causes a lot of schools to abandon their primary mission — educating students — to pursue a mission of improving standardized test scores by X%. Test prep is hammered home with mountains of homework so teachers don’t get dinged for not challenging students enough.
Using business-like incentives (the best-run schools get more budget) is counterintuitive in education: the worst schools need more support, not less. Closing down a low-performing school furthers the goal of meeting the metrics, but often not the goal of educating students. A lot of attention is paid to the impact of this in low-performing schools, but when you give high-performing schools bigger budgets, they just pile more work on the kids as parents apply pressure for intense college prep.
So you end up with 2 kinds of schools: one that provides basic services focused on test metrics to keep the little funding they have, and another that has test scores covered through demographic advantages and focuses on college prep because the parents are better educated and more involved in their kids’ lives. Kids are stressed out in both schools — instability and violence in the former, massive expectations and workloads in the latter. But I think the cause is the same: by forcing our kids to operate in a business-like environment, they end up looking a lot like the stressed-out employees of big companies.
What do we really have to look forward to?
More extreme weather, less water, more migration from countries where people have it worse than you, rise in political parties suggesting protectionism and anti-immigrant policies to combat the above, lower quality goods that don't last as long as people chase that margin down, less interesting and interest in art as people lack the spare time to come up with anything remotely non-mainstream, increasingly censored internet, rise in "tropical" diseases such as dengue fever & ebola in non-tropical countries due to climate change, more religion, more random civilian deaths at the hands of marginalised people and the police, people being prevented from travel/shop/work due to unchallengeable blacklisting by corporate CCTV networks with face/gait recognition resulting in homelessness.
Yep, there's a storm comin' alright.
The only solution I see to this is the richest 1% or so paying everyone else to have no children. It would sort out just about every problem in about 50 years. I don't see another solution.
Except for the whole "economic collapse" thing. See Japan.
That is part of the issue though. It wasn't that long ago that that was true of most people (90s is pushing it a bit, but before?).
These days a lot of people are DINK, and you're competing with those. So not only you have to index the salary for inflation, you have to consider that you're competing with people who don't have a bunch of kids, and whom's spouse also brings in a salary.
So (not a real calculation, but just to make a point) assume the spouse would make the same amount of money and the kids are taking half of it, the DINK equivalent of income available for housing is now inflation + 4x that.
If the norm back then was: 1 income, multiple kids.
Now you have - 1 income, 1 or more kids (essentially screwed) - 1 income, no kids - 2 incomes, 1 or more kids - 2 income, no kids (so far beyond the first case that the former can't come close to competing).
Its also why if you are in the later camp and something happens (you lose your job or get sick and get a divorce), you're completely fucked.
You can probably own a home if you want. You can travel the world if you want. You can meet a nice girl and cook food together in a cozy apartment. You can start brewing beer as a hobby with your friends. You can hike the Appalachian trail.
You can do a lot of things if you want.
The problem isn't that Chicago is going to become uninhabitable. The problem is that food supply for billions of people are going to be threatened, that will make the flood of refugees from Syria seem like a trickle.
It will also be a very gradual increase in temperature and we humans are very good at adapting and finding solutions.
Serious question: Have you ever lived in a country that was in the middle of a famine?
People 'find solutions' to that problem. They aren't pretty. Those solutions consist of 'rob', 'starve, or 'leave'.
If you live in the first world, your problem is going to be dealing with people who are taking option #3. We're barely capable of dealing with a flow of refugees from one or two countries.
Besides, I have to compete with people on welfare who have a lot more time to chase girls than I do as the person paying for their welfare.
Basically it's a mix between boomers not selling, and millennial's not wanting what they are selling (because what they are selling is shit). When we bought our home, we were looking at old (built in 1940's) starter homes in the 200k to 250k range and it was a nightmare. Anything that was great was out of our price range, and anything decent to 'ok' would be sold in the first 24 hours. Most of the stuff that wasn't selling was just straight garbage - stuff that would require a lot of work and money (50k minimum) to get moved into the 'decent' category.
There are plenty of new houses being built, but you have to go an hour or an hour and half outside the city. I have a family member and friend who went this route and they love it, but that obviously leads to long commutes and other downsides.
[1]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/real-estate/ct-re-millennial-...
"I can't afford to do the thing I want to do most."
"Then do something else."
If jobs in Toronto aren't paying enough to live there, move. Find a job making less money in a place where you can actually afford to live. I understand you may want the lifestyle afforded by being in a big city, but you're not owed that experience.
The answer is to flee these places, move on to greener pastures, these are barren.
Perhaps we should be thankful so many people are unaware of the cities between the coasts, more people might come here and wreck it!
With all due respect, this sounds like complete horseshit. How much are you paying for rent?
"Reported Average Starting Salary" for a mechanical engineer in 1995 was $35,744, or $55,189 adjusted to 2015 (https://www.naceweb.org/job-market/compensation/salary-trend...). Federal taxes on that are about $8,078 (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040tt.pdf); let's double that to account for state and local taxes; $39,033 net after taxes, or $3,253/month.
Average rent in Seattle is $1,965 (https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/wa/se...), but many neighborhoods are lower and more in tune with upstate New York (and "20 miles outside" is anywhere between Everett, Snoqualmie, or nearly to Tacoma); let's split the difference at $1,600. That leaves $1,653/month. Call it $53 for ramen and beer one night a month (that's a lot of ramen and beer) and there's $1,600 for everything else.
> I'm in the same spot I grew up with my grandparents in, barely making it with like an extra $40/mo for ramen & beer with a friend or two one night for entertainment. No debt. It's such a common story among my similarly aged friends too.
A $35,000 car loan, 60 mos, 5%, is about $660/mo (https://www.bankrate.com/loans/auto-loans/current-auto-loan-... average student loan debt is $38,390 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_debt), 120 mos (https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ask-cfpb/how-long-does-it-ta...), 8% (https://www.valuepenguin.com/student-loans/student-loan-inte...) is about $466/mo. That totals to $1,126, leaving only $474 for vegetables and stuff.
A lot of what I’ll call “third tier” cities (Cleveland, Boise, Reno, etc.) are facing housing shortages precisely because a lot of people were priced out of larger cities. So housing shortages are popping up in those places as well, driving up home prices dramatically. I know at least one of those cities where the average price of a 2br house jumped from $300k to $600k in 5 years.
As usual, the problems are NIMBYs and restrictive zoning with a heavy preference for single-family homes. But moving to smaller, cheaper cities is only a short-term solution. The long-term solution is to build more, denser housing.
Reno's listing price $231/ft^2 up from $151/ft^2 five years ago, but keep in mind that Reno was rather badly hit by 2008: median sales prices for 2br homes peaked at about $284,000 in 2006, bottomed at about $75,000 in 2011, and are currently back up to $271,000 (https://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Reno-Nevada/market-trends...).
It’s a problem that will get worse before it gets better, and the cities that can figure out how to provide housing that someone working minimum wage can afford will be the winners.
Putting up fences next to train tracks won't do much for the former, but I suspect it will reduce the frequency of the latter (which it did, in this case).
It reduced the frequency of "suicide by train". But suicides overall went up 30% from what the article states. It's more likely that the people who could no longer use this method as a spur of the moment thing just chose something else. Transportation related suicide accounts for 0.4% (or ~170 in 2012) of suicides in the US. [0] "Fall", another spur of the moment method, accounts for 6 times as much. You can only build so many fences.
As someone with a bit of experience on the topic I can tell you that when suicidal ideation reaches the tipping point you need more than a fence to stop them.
But I'm not saying "don't put up the fence". I just found GP's remark that "The fences and guards have absolutely helped" either a bit cynical or unrealistically optimistic. The only thing we can say with certainty is that it helped keep the trains going. I'm not sure it definitively saved lives. For that we need to do a lot more than build a fence...
[0] http://lostallhope.com/suicide-statistics/us-methods-suicide
Things effective one place, are less effective in others because of "sociocultural" reasons [0], but there is some evidence to suggest denying people access to the tools to commit suicide, and reducing media coverage (social contagion/clustering) seem to help.
With that said, yes, you are right, just changing one thing doesn't do much, there needs to be a bigger picture approach that addresses many factors.
Exactly right. We put people on the moon and we did it without grinding 8 year olds with hours and hours of homework.
These parents are absolutely relentless on their kids. It's a really sad expression of 'keep up with Joneses'.
Really? Do you mean that typical NASA engineers, astronauts, and other hard-working and gifted people involved in the Great Space Race, typically were not intensely trained, but just had all childhood time full of playing?
Recently, in Colorado Springs, CO, a teen suicide cluster was allowed to fester for a number of years in the evangelical community. The coroner, respecting the religious wishes of the bereaved, listed the teen suicudes not as suicides per se, and these victims were not included in official stats. The religious community believed that death was not the end and that the victims would live on in heaven. The victim would be lionized and become the 'most popular kid in school' for a while. Finally, the memorialization of the victims was wide spread via social media and the religious community, and was also very public with lots of people attending funerals. The combination of these factors allowed the suicide rate to spike 4900% there [1,2].
Though stress is undoubtably a trigger for suicide, it seems that suicide is very complicated and individual, despite the cluster nature of it. More research has been helpful in preventing this horrible 'disease' from spreading further, and awareness of the issue is being increasingly taught to our youth.
If anyone reading this is feeling suicidal, please reach out! In addition to the hotlines (1-800-273-8255), I would like to personally help you. Let me know a good email address and we can talk offline. I really, honestly, do want to help you.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/2016/10/28/teen-suicide-contagious-...
[2] https://gazette.com/education/teen-suicides-spike-in-el-paso...
I went to a "college prep" high school that was harder than my college. As I became independent, I realized that intense academics stole my childhood and didn't have the value that the adults believe they have.
At the same time, when I lived in Palo Alto, I used to hear about how one of the high schools, (Gunn?) had a very high suicide rate due to the stress of academics. Someone (Caltrans?) put fences around the train tracks to try and stop suicides.
(I wish commenters wouldn't immediately blame social media.)