Hobart makes a convincing argument that you can: "Fatalism says that my morrow is determined no matter how I struggle. This is of course a superstition. Determinism says that my morrow is determined through my struggle. There is this significance in my mental effort, that it is deciding the event." [1]
i.e., he is a "compatibilist", thinking that you can believe in free will and determinism too.
If you find Hobart persuasive, time-blindness or no, it does make sense to reproach someone for being habitually unpunctual.
By "being" the label, one has little to no agency over it. Without agency, there is no responsibility, nor incentive to change. Without responsibility or incentive to change, there is no problem for the individual; rather the problem is everyone else.
This isn't just something that a person can do to themselves- it's something society can do to people. The phrase "bigotry of low expectations" describes a behavior of assuming that a label identifies a person, and that they have no personal agency to overcome it. The behavioral shift of everyone around that person molds the image the person has of themselves to a limited, restricted version of what they're actually capable of.
Like "unwell"*, "uncool" or "has bad taste"
In the barbaric old days, like you mean, there was racism (no longer objective)... Nowadays you can deny my suggested labels are cruel, plausibly, even in court!
*"Sick" is now a term of endearment, alas
tlb or pg has a pithy saying that I can't find now goes smth like
"we should avoid labels [on people] not because they are useless (they aren't) but they are hard to get right. Adding the cost of being wrong to that makes them not worth it"
There's some connection to the "build skill or taste?" dilemma threaded earlier
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44469163
You can make proper use of labels-- that requires taste. To build skill, you try to find new labels that can go viral ;)
E.g you combine them like Hobart :)
I guess pg is Paul Graham. Who is tlb?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
'Trevor L. Blackwell', co-founder of YC
Pls help
This is a good example of where over-thinking a topic in abstract terms causes some people to lose sight of the big picture.
Take a step back and think about what you’re saying: If nobody could be held accountable for their own actions, does the concept of accountability disappear? It’s a farcical claim.
But you’re right, this is essentially what is being argued: By invoking therapy speak and formal sounding labels, the person wants you to kindly box up any accountability or consequences under the label and direct them at the abstract notion of the labeled condition, instead of the person responsible.
This is why I experienced so many people getting worse at punctuality after learned the phrase “time blindness”: They used the therapy speak to transform themselves into the victim, at which point the pressure to improve their situation diminished because they believe victims couldn’t be blamed. The temptation becomes strong to label everything negative this way as it’s a nice escape hatch to externalize accountability.
It's harder to escape from "has bad taste" than from "irresponsible" :)
>Bad taste leads to crime
Useful reminder (originally Stendhal's, that Lead poisoning is always indirect)?
OT warnings
I've been thinking about an escape hatch here:
Imagine that all philosophical notions of free will were incoherent. In that case non-philosophers' use of "free will" would either be a) inherited from this philosophical incoherence, or b) pretentious/ambiguous nomenclature that reduces to a more practical, well-defined term-- e.g., self-determination, freedom from tyranny, etc.
In reality, it seems like in the vast majority of non-philosophers mean "free will" as a short-hand for one of the more practical, workaday terms. The only edge case I can think of is the use of "free will" in the history of Christian theology, but I very rarely see that come up in non-academic situations.
If my supposition is right, then we can practically swap out nearly all instances of "free will" for the relevant non-philosophical, well-specified lay terms. And the continue to hold people responsible for their actions based on the centuries of case-law, common law, social history and medical knowledge that led up to our modern era. Perhaps more importantly, we can incrementally level up our understanding of responsibility/justice based on modern research into human behavior, while completely avoid digressions into philosophical determinism.
In fact, I'd speculate that college philosophy "free will 101" classes are a kind of unwitting bait and switch. I bet if you did a survey, most prospective students would be expecting a class that sharpens their teeth on one of the workaday synonyms, most often something like "self-actualization." But that has about as much to do with "free will" that as "coffee bean calligraphy" has to do with Javascript. (Alternatively: it would be a fun prank to do a "free will 101" class that teaches students to stand up for what they believe in, resist tyranny, etc. :)
Edit: clarification
Surely this is trivially "yes". If their actions are deterministic, then your responses to their actions must also be deterministic, including holding them responsible (punishment, firing, etc).
Whether this is best described as "learning", or as "internalised <whatever>", or as "trauma", is left to the reader.
TL;DR: It argues that what comes after "God is dead" (Nietzsche) is "the soul is dead" (or less poetically, "the self is dead"), i.e. we become convinced we have no agency, but mere biological and environmental automatons with the concomitant lack of moral accountability.
(Credit to earljwagner's 2023 post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37950313)
From my understanding, compatibilism boils down to accepting that everything may be pre-determined, but people are still free to make choices as long as they are uncoerced.
The argument from that quote above is a little bit subtler and I aligns with my thinking. I don't believe we have free will in any sense, either everything is pre-determined, or it is random, and I can't even think of a definition of free will that would make sense (just like the compatiblism one does not to me). But clearly there is a feedback loop going on, and so it is inherently in the species best interest to hold people accountable for their actions, because the act of holding them accountable forms part of the inputs that lead people to make choices. Not doing this is not a great survivability trait overall. Doing so, we survive a bit more.
But I'm not sure that is strictly necessary to call oneself a compatibilist.
https://www.simplypsychology.org/adhd-time-blindness.html
I don't watch TikTok videos, I don't use Instagram, but I have been plagued by these symptoms my entire life, and don't really care about others opinions on it. You probably don't have it if those symptoms don't resonate with you, but there are plenty of people who genuinely struggle, and there's likely some overlap with those who have undiagnosed ADHD.
The first sentence claims that it’s something people with ADHD might experience, not a specific condition. In other words, it’s just the therapy-speak way of saying “chronically late”.
Note that the date on the article is also very recent: Only a few months old. This date is after the trend was popular on TikTok. It was likely written in response to the trend, as a way of capturing search engine traffic from people searching for it.
This is representative of the issue I was describing: There’s a sense among some people that using the therapy-speak terminology for something transforms it into a different type of personality attribute, for which they can’t be held responsible. Saying “I have a problem with being on time” and “I have time blindness” are functionally equivalent, but some people want to believe they the therapy speak labeled version warrants different treatment.
Also, being able to Google a TikTok-famous phrase and get hits from SEO-targeted blog posts like this doesn’t really make it official nomenclature. They’re just trying to capture traffic with trending keywords. This is a very obvious SEO article.
Saying “I have a problem with being on time” and “I have time blindness” are functionally equivalent. Applying therapy speak doesn’t change the situation.
This is all very much missing the point, though. Someone who believes they have “time blindness” should recognize that they have a higher need for additional measures to address their issue, including more use of time keeping aids, alarms, and even accountability from external parties. Trying to use a labeled condition to escape accountability for one’s actions is not only unhelpful, it goes against the entire purpose of therapy.
The problem becomes more clear when you imagine the same idea applied to other issues: If someone is constantly lashing out and yelling at people, they don’t get a free pass for saying they have “an anger issue”. They’re still accountable for the consequences of their actions, regardless of what name you put on it.
Is time blindness a disability that requires accommodation? To what extent, and who decides? If not, what makes it different from other disabilities that do get accommodation or some kind of protected status?
(These are meant to be rhetorical questions, but I’m sure someone has a direct answer, so I’d be interested in that too, because I really don’t know)
[1] https://askjan.org/limitations/Managing-Time.cfm?csSearch=10...
That would depend on the jobs requirements, wouldn't it? In some roles that might be a complete deal breaker. For example, anything customer/client facing. If you can't perform the jobs duties with reasonable accommodation, maybe you should find another job?
Similarly, if you are 3 feet tall you'll likely never be the worlds slam dunk champion. Not even if they provide you with a step-stool. It's not your fault, or the employers. Sorry, I guess.
It's not fun or easy for anyone to find a new job. However, it's usually less painful than staying if you're poorly suited to your current role.
We all have strengths and weaknesses. The secret to living a good life is learning to take an honest inventory of your personal capabilities and then figuring out how to work with what you have.
I truly hope that things improve for you.
I'm not sure why you're attempting to discredit it, was the Masters in Science of the author, and the review by a doctor not sufficient for you?
I never missed your point, I made no comment on people failing to hold themselves accountable for their behaviour. You certainly seem unable to comprehend that not everyone experiences time as you do.
"You have an unlicensed condition, citizen!"
Just saying "I'm time blind, sorry not sorry, deal with it" is not an appropriate reaction to causing trouble to your surroundings.
Who defines conditions, says that ADHD is real, for example? It wasn't in earlier generations. The are terms of social (group) art - special names that are generally accepted as meaningful.
Your advice is as ignorant as saying 'just do more fun things' to someone with depression.
Teaching kids discipline without empathy doesn't create resilience. It creates shame, masking, and fear of expressing emotions. And yeah, being on time matters. But so does understanding why the kid is melting down in the first place, especially if it’s a recurring thing. Otherwise, you’re just dragging a panicked, overwhelmed human out the door like a bag of potatoes and calling it a parenting win.
there is massive, massive emotional fatigue to the amount of effort that getting through a day with ADHD entails, and this is on top of other things like having a ton of sensory sensitivity where literally just being around bright lights, is being bright outside, the sound of traffic, lawn mowers, leaf blowers, car horns, a door shutting loudly, someone clinking dishes while serving coffee, all cause emotional reactions in me that are intense enough for me to physically cringe. i literally cried while driving home a week ago at night because the oncoming car headlights are so bright the entire drive and i have to drive with one arm stretched out to block them from my view and etc etc
my brain is not an easy place to live. i am cognitively capable of understanding what technique can help with what issues. the problem is both recognizing every possible way my adhd can fuck things up and the amount of mental and emotional drain it is to have to consider everything all the time lest something fall between the cracks.
Also, saying “regardless of diagnosis” is invalidating the real need for accommodations. People with ADHD often require not just personal effort, but systemic support, whether that’s in school, work, or healthcare.
Usually such techniques tend to not work when they are suggested by people who haven't experienced the consdition and haven't put serious thought into them.
here's the real thought process (edit: the writing is all over the place but im not gonna spend more time editing)
it's the night before, you know you need to leave at 7am, you pick up your phone to set alarm, and you see a text from jimmy, you spend 3 minutes texting jimmy, put your phone down, and move on to something else completely oblivious to the fact that you didnt actually set an alarm. i never CHOSE to text jimmy, there was zero percent of my brain that said "i see a text from jimmy, but i should set my alarm first because i might forget otherwise, so im going to set an alarm and then text jimmy just to be safe". this is what it means to have lack executive functioning. I will find myself making actions i did not make a decision to do, and the smaller the action it is the more likely i will do it without having ever decided to do it. for example, i will be focused writing software at my desk. 30 seconds later im standing in the kitchen, looking in the fridge, pulling out a sandwich, and it occurs to me: i never decided to stand up and go to the kitchen. the decision making process literally never occurred. I have to literally TIE MYSELF TO MY DESK to stop myself from doing stuff like this.
luckily, you wake up accidentally at 6am. crisis averted! you still have 20 minutes before you need to get out of bed. no problem, scroll hacker news. it's now 6:35am and oh shit i should have been out of bed 15 minutes ago, i didn't set an alarm for that because i didn't think i would lose track of time when im literally staring at the time in the corner of my screen, i rush out of bed and jump in the shower thinking this will take a couple minutes, no big deal. however adhd makes you chronically underestimate how long something takes, because im generally really unaware of how much time elapses when i shower because i have time blindness. it's not 6:45am and i need to be leaving out the door, but my shower actually took 10 minutes, and im now soaking wet and still have to get on my clothes.
but wait, i need to take my meds, i really really cannot forget that. so i go grab my meds, but then wait i need water. so i go fill up my water bottle for the day like i always do, but its dirty, so i need to wash it first, and at this point im hyperfixating on doing what feels like a necessary step because part of adhd is losing bigger picture context and longer term rewards, my brain told me "i hve to take meds which means i need water which means filling water bottle which means washing it" and my brain literally doesn't ever take a step backwards until it's now 6:55am and i finally took my meds and FUCK i'm not 20 minutes late.
repeat at every single step of every single day for the rest of your life. this is also why people with adhd have the stigma of being lazy. the reality is that we can and often get less done when it's not something that intrinsically motivates us (most things) because everything is THREE TIMES HARDER. we're constantly stumbling, constantly having to set a million timers, having fatigue of so many timers, so sometimes we're over confident in not needing them because it's not reasonable to set 40 freaking timers every day, but then one in five times we slip up, and now im 5 minutes late for a meeting, and i show up and my boss is being pissy because he thinks im some self diagnosing tiktok idiot because has no idea what this looks like and how it impacts me despite trying really really fucking hard and absolutely hating it
Yes you did. You are an adult human being with free will.
Not everyone's experience is the same as yours. Denying that only makes you look like an idiot.
this lack of executive functioning is a cornerstone of ADHD. this isn't a controversial opinion, it's universally accepted fact of the disorder
But yeah, let's be stupidly early. I think part of accepting that you have a mental condition means that your life will simply not be optimal. Which is harsh to accept in a society which values efficiency above all else.
“It takes me 15 minutes to get to my destination. I should leave 5 minutes earlier than I need to in case there’s traffic or whatever.”
Set an alarm for 20 minutes before you need to get there, and leave when it goes off. Done.
I will absolutely trivialize it because everyone I’ve ever known that’s like that simply leaves at the time they’re supposed to already be somewhere. Or yes, they get distracted and start working on stuff that they know will take 30 minutes when they need to leave in 10. Thankfully we all have mini computers in our pockets that tell us exactly how long it takes to get somewhere that can also easily set alarms.
It's never just one thing like travel time, it's scores of steps in a routine, which aren't always the same, and can easily be derailed by anything unexpected. You can estimate how long something you do frequently will take, based on how much time it took previously, and still get an inapplicable answer because distraction is a constant problem, and the executive function deficit means you literally do not think 'don't do that, get back on task' in the moment. You know how long everything should take, and still struggle to apply that when you're doing the routine.
There are things we're good at and things we need strategies to mitigate. I may not have ADHD but I have friends and family that do, so I'm familiar enough with it. What steps in a routine are needed to leave the house? Find your keys and wallet? Always put them in the same place. Go to the bathroom and maybe check how you look? Set that timer I talked about 3 minutes earlier. Other people with your condition can handle it; so can you.
Still pushing those preconceptions, eh? Is this how you approach everything you could learn from? Assume you know all the answers before actually studying? Your teacup is full.
Continuing with the walking stick metaphor...it'd be like if the person with the walking stick was frequently committing to go jogging, hiking, etc with others. They know the activity might be beyond their capabilities, but they keep saying they'll go on the difficult hiking trail or whatever. This impacts the plan for everyone else.
Saying you'll be somewhere at a particular time is a commitment to someone else. If you're making commitments and frequently breaking them, people will react badly to that.
Having had a number of chronically late people pass through my life, I've often heard "be there in a second", "I'm on my way", "5 minutes, max" and similar phrases once the person is late. What I rarely hear is proactive acknowledgement and ownership of the issue.
The commitments you make as a chronically late person need to include your chronic lateness as a factor, just as the mobility limited person should take their limitations into account before signing up for the group hike.
Just fuck off, mate. You're clearly writing with an agenda to push your preconceptions, apparently none of which include first-hand experience of living with a disorder.
I haven't read much psychology, but this article suggests a lot of psychological diagnoses are just labels for symptoms:
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2025/02/06/the-mind-in-the-whe...
Imagine that your car breaks down and you bring it to a mechanic and he tells you, “Oh, your car has a case of broken-downness.” You’d know right away: this guy has no idea what he’s talking about. “Broken-downness” is an abstraction; it doesn’t refer to anything, and it’s not going to help you fix a car.Any idea whether or not their characterization of psychological diagnoses is mostly correct?
It is treated with stimulants, but if you give those same stimulants to a non-ADHD person you will see very different results
Still down a bit and you’ll find plenty of vagueness with mechanics. “You have a bad tie-rod end.” Ok, cool. What caused that, why did mine fail when my buddy’s didn’t, how can I avoid this? Shrug. Once you’ve got it down to a part, you just replace it with a new one. Can’t do that with mental health. “Your time management unit is bad, we can replace it with a manufacturer part for $2,000, or an aftermarket equivalent for $1,500.”
> Often has difficulty organizing tasks and activities (e.g., difficulty managing sequential tasks; difficulty keeping materials and belongings in order; messy, disorganized work; has poor time management; fails to meet deadlines).
The DSM doesn't list all minutiae of every general problem.
Having a single symptom does not mean someone has the condition. The diagnostic criteria for the condition for which you took that quote (out of context) is more comprehensive. It’s not a simple matter of doing Ctrl+F on the DSM and seeing that something can be a symptom or something else.
This is more obvious when you start thinking of other conditions: Feelings of sadness are a symptom of depression, but not everyone who has feelings of sadness has depression.
The misuse and misinterpretation of the DSM has become commonplace in parallel with the use of therapy speak.
They simply stated that time blindness is a real issue and linked to an article which acknowledges exactly what you are describing: "Many people with ADHD struggle with a lesser-known but deeply frustrating sign called time blindness." (emphasis mine)
The problem is that many people incorrectly self-diagnose as suffering from conditions like time blindness. Which they do for a variety of reasons: To externalize accountability for why they're late, to feel special, and so on.
A comparison is the large number of people who claim "gluten sensitivity" and maintain special diets. Now there are serious medical conditions like celiac disease that require one to avoid gluten. But the vast majority of self-diagnosed "gluten sensitives" do not have such conditions. Researchers conclude that for many of them there is no physical basis for their self-diagnosis.
Among other things this phenomenon makes it harder for people with actual conditions to be taken seriously, because there are so many impostors.
I think the only source of disagreement is in the way you chose to frame it in absolutes, i.e., "all such people" instead of "people".
Framing anything in absolutes counts as a strawman argument, because all you need to do to refute it is find a single case, no matter how isolated it is, where it doesn't apply.
What issue would that be? People falsely claiming they suffer from conditions they do not have? Or is it when they claim they struggle with a condition they self-diagnosed but somehow don't even bother to seek medical help not even to verify a diagnosis? Because if there is something that harms those who actually have to endure these conditions is people making fraudulent claims and trying to capitalize on everyone's goodwill.
> I mean, I can sympathise with the frustration of people somewhat 'giving up' after labelling their own issues, but it's not a logical conclusion to assign it all to a trend.
Is it "giving up", or is it just abusing a label they clearly know doesn't apply to them? You're somehow avoiding the elephant in the room and the whole point of this thread, which is the problem created by fraudulent claims by attention seekers.
Most restaurants have menu items with zero gluten, so eating out is hardly difficult. Not much gluten in a plain steak, potato, and vegetables.
Sadly this doesn't really work due to the current state of psychiatry where many people with legitimate issues are being denied a diagnosis and treatment (see for example: trans healthcare and gatekeeping, adhd healthcare, etc). It is even more weird because often when you go to two different doctors you will get different results.
Not to mention that usually to even explore the idea of getting an official diagnosis you start with a self diagnosis.
> But the vast majority of self-diagnosed "gluten sensitives" do not have such conditions.
If you believe that you have celiac but for whatever reason you haven't been able to test it yet, then there is no harm to try going glutten free. The real issue is how many people deny the very existence of glutten sensitivity and put these people in danger. If you look at communities of people with the disease you will see what I am talking about.
You just made one hell of a strawman argument about what GP said.
He merely stated that “the vast majority of self-diagnosed ‘gluten sensitives’ do not have such conditions”, as you quoted. This comment jibes with my experience.
The two folks I know who have full-blown celiac end up projectile vomiting for hours if they consume even small amounts of gluten (e.g., gross contamination in a fryer or on a cutting board).
The two folks I know who have milder versions were able to figure out that they needed to be tested in fairly short order due to “digestion issues” when they ate gluten.
On the other hand, the dozens of other folks I know who claim to be “sensitive to gluten” have no real basis when saying so. When I mentioned to them that I have friends with celiac, and I empathize with them, and I suggest they get tested if they haven’t yet (undiagnosed celiac is real), the answer I get are nothing short of glib - “oh, I’m just on a keto diet, and this is an easy way to do it”, “oh, I just found that I feel bad after eating things like cake” (sugar crash? diabetic?), or “oh, I’m fine, I just want them to make a fresh one (of whatever) for me”.
Your defense of folks who claim a problem that they can (often) fairly easily determine that they don’t have is enabling those folks’ dysfunction — that is, lying to themselves and (per this thread) using labeling as a defensive tactic.
People who actually have celiac need very specific accommodations. But the multiples of people who claim “gluten sensitivity” when they don’t actually have it causes large swathes of the general population to disbelieve the folks who really do have it.
It’s ok to call out the poseurs for what they are while still looking out for folks who have celiac or might have celiac and don’t know it yet.
neurodivergence can and frequently is a real debilitating disability. it is really fucking hard to cope with in a society that actively punishes it, and is full of perspectives like yours that invalidate these very real conditions.
i understand it's a difficult thing to wrap your head around. it isn't super visible like someone missing their legs. it's a really complicated, nuance spectrum of problems that are also really difficult to understand by people who don't have it, and frequently the people who do have it also don't know they have or understand how it impacts them
yes ADHD is better recognized and better treated these days. but as this entire comment section shows, there is still tons of stigma, misunderstanding, and a lack of compassion for a real disability
Speaking as one with a huge challenge in this space. No one is going to go “oh, you have ADHD, well, I guess you don’t need to fulfil that expectation…”
That might be a projection; just a punctual person peeved off with the chronically late; but I was just adding the point that being challenged in this area isn’t an excuse.
I’m on-time for work stuff; I’ve figured out how to compensate. Personal life, ok, different story, but the responsibility has always rested with me.
You're so ignorant.
So is Munchausen syndrome, but somehow people don't self diagnose that one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factitious_disorder_imposed_on...
This was in the top few results for "is time blindness real": https://www.today.com/health/time-blindness-rcna146990
An interview with a PhD psychologist, who explains that it's not a formal diagnosis, but still describes a real problem. Educate yourself before shooting your mouth off.
You acknowledged the fact that "there are those who self-diagnose without really suffering from a condition".
I, in turn, added to the fact that you pointed out that not only are there "those who self-diagnose without really suffering from a condition" but there is also a complex mental disorder where individuals play the role of a sick patient to receive some form of psychological validation.
This somehow triggered in you an emotional reaction. Why was that?
>Patients with FDIS intentionally falsify or induce signs and symptoms of illness, trauma, or abuse to assume this role. These actions are performed consciously, though the patient may be unaware of the motivations driving their behaviors.
I'm not convinced 'I have that!' statements quite meet the criteria for that. You may be thinking of malingering.
I think a lot of societal change these days can be summarized by the idea that self-labeling is seen as transforming something into "everyone else's problem".
Western society has basically built a hyper capitalist system that creates individualistic consumers, but has failed to hold individuals accountable to minimum standards.
The bar has never been lower and we just sort of amble on as a lonely, isolated society so long as the stock market grows quarter to quarter.
Especially when it comes to alcoholism. As if the soviet union was a bastion of soberness with a high bar or something.
Economics is intertwined with every other study. We can't pretend socio-economics isn't real, social interactions fuel the economy and the economy influences our social interactions.
Also, making connections to way capitalism might fuel addictive disorders, such as, say, talking about advertising of alcohol and tobacco, does NOT mean that we are saying communism is perfect. Communism fuels disorders in other ways. It's actually quiet childish to take any analysis of capitalism as a praise of communism. It's the sort of "team sport" mentality you see in politics among the most uneducated and reductive among us.
I don't get it, because we do this with other stuff all the time. I program in C#, guess what? I have plenty of critiques of C#. That doesn't mean I want C# to go die, I love C#. It seems to me everyone understands this... until it's capitalism. And then, suddenly, it's our first day on Earth.
Also capitalism, like everything, is not just one thing. It's a complex beast and there's infinite possible implementations of a capitalist economy. Nobody actually wants raw, unregulated capitalism because that sucks major ass. Yes, that's a technical phrase.
Meaning, we can, and should, be looking to progressively improve our economic system. I mean, it's what we've been doing since forever.
It is trying to remove the shame from the equation, because it is not a productive emotion. It makes people postpone and avoid steps necessary for treatment.
And yet people are using things like "time blindness" as excuses.
The feedback of reality will fix it, like for all young people.
"A child who isn't disciplined at home, will be disciplined outside of the home" - old African proverb.
The issue is kids growing up without being taught accountability, but instead that they're perpetual victims of "the system" created by evil old white men, and therefore nothing they do is ever their fault. This is the fault of the parents, school system and society as a whole who coddles kids giving them the false sense of security that they can always have their way, right until they hit the brick wall of adulthood featuring employment, bills, debt, responsibilities and self sufficiency.
I don't get where this idea that kids are coddled with comes from. They usually are not even allowed to wear the cloths they want or choose the food they want and get pushed around to silly extents.
Kids almost never gets it their way.
I.e. not cleaning up toys from the floor. Staying up late. Wearing different colored socks. Playing or speaking too laud. What ever. The consequences of those are really complex or fuzzy and the threshold level for breaking the rules arbitrary.
Also the subset of "bad decisions" that maybe have some distant future bad consequence, i.e. eating too much ice cream, are even harder. Or all the 'none will like you if you do that' things you need to teach kids.
Speak for yourself. I've seen 2 year olds being able to choose their clothes and if they don't get their way, they throw a temper tantrum so bad they vomit.
And I fear, the child will turn into another Cartman. I.e. spoiled beyond any belief.
If you imagine it from the perspective of aliens with very different biology, it’s kind of crazy that this important and difficult task is given to people with zero training or qualifications.
But the majority of young adults are rightfully asking hard questions.
Why should they suffer the consequences of political and corporate mismanagement ? Why is accountability rarely invoked when it comes to people in power? Why is it OK for old disgruntled people to yell at them for things they have nothing to do with? Why should they take us seriously if we don't take them seriously?
Again, I agree with you that some are hiding behind these things in order to deflect blame, but let's not pretend that the young don't have every right to be mad at us.
Who said they should? Nobody should ideally, but that's the way the world works: shit rolls downhill. And being a cheeky little shit at work, will not result in a revolutionary change at the top of corporations leadership the way you imagine, but will just result in your direct manager's career being at risk due to your behavior, so you're giving him no choice but to cut you because they're not gonna die on your hill for you. Cultural changes take a long time and need to involve 90%+ of the workforce, not just a few.
>Why is accountability rarely invoked when it comes to people in power?
You know why. Because the rules are made by those in power, and people choose to rise to power in order to make the rules by which others are held accountable.
That's why young people are engaging in the "lying flat" or quiet quitting movements, and voting outsiders of the establishment like Trump, Mamdani, etc. They want to flip the monopoly board over because they know they were dealt a shit hand. And while I'm not that young anymore, I totally support their movement.
As young adults always had, since the dawn of time.
And as they've received and comprehended the answers, most quickly stopped asking.
That is part of what becoming an adult, without the "young" bit, means. It's not like these things are unknowable, or that the "system of things" is secretive. It's all rather obvious - it just takes a little time and experience to figure out the questions and notice the answers.
----
> Why should they suffer the consequences of political and corporate mismanagement?
Because that's how it works. It's not that different from asking, why should they suffer the consequences of a tree falling on them and crushing them? Because they happened to stand under it at the time, duh!
Society and civilization aren't fixtures created by nature/God - they're built out of human interactions. People pursuing all kinds of interests, alone or in groups, navigating around each other, cooperating, convincing or coercing each other. It's all abstract systems created and maintained by strangers. And the unfortunate reality is, someone screws up somewhere badly enough, everyone downstream of it suffers.
The sad irony is, the consequences they ask about come from mismanagement of systems that were created in the past to shield people from consequences of failure of earlier versions of the same or similar systems! That's what civilization is, in a way - stacking systemic solutions to problems of previous systems!
The silver lining is in hoping that every iteration makes less people suffer consequences and to a lesser degree.
> Why is accountability rarely invoked when it comes to people in power?
It is invoked much more often than they think, but they're not able to recognize it - it looks different than with people not in power. And it needs to be different, because the situation is different too.
> Why is it OK for old disgruntled people to yell at them for things they have nothing to do with?
Why is it OK for them to yell at old disgruntled people for things they have nothing to do with? Yelling is easy. Understanding that almost no one individually has much influence on how things are, that can unfortunately take a lifetime.
> Why should they take us seriously if we don't take them seriously?
Because that's how life works. It was the same for us when we were young, and for our parents when they were young, etc. Young people don't know shit about life, and don't even realize that yet. Over time, they acquire knowledge, experience and relationships, and various kinds of power - and along the way, they are treated more and more seriously, until they themselves become the people "running things" and start hearing the same questions they used to ask from the next generation of kids.
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To be clear: I'm not saying that things are all ideal, or even perfectly fine. I'm just saying that the answers to those questions aren't mysterious, and figuring them out is exactly what growing up to be an adult in a society looks like. It always has, which is why you can see the exact same complaints about "kids these days" and "old farts" showing up in every period in history, all the way back to ancient Greece and earlier.
Or they could try to start a revolution, but frankly most of them are too weak and fragile to attempt anything that involves real sacrifice and risk.
Decades of studies refute this.
This often seems to come with some assumption of moral superiority.
But under the label many of them are absolutely mainstream people. Their posts aren't genuine spontaneous comments - they're calibrated and calculated as a marketing exercise for "engagement" and to promote a product, course, Insta lifestyle, and so on.
I realise it's tough out there and everyone has to hustle. But there really aren't many who acknowledge the gulf between the vocabulary of rebellion from the reality of "Please buy my course on how to be anticapitalist." (Actual example - not made up.)
If I looked I imagine I'd find a mirror image of hustle conformity and superiority culture on far right boards, only more so.
It's all quite weirdly Social Media™.
Edit: to add, I'm not criticising specific subgroups. I'm very aware the US is a dangerous place and being certain kinds of person significantly decreases your life expectancy.
It's more how social media has somehow distorted the online experience of those subgroups away from straightforward human exchange into commercial opportunity without people being aware of it.
Or maybe this is just how young people think when given access to this type of information.
Turning employment and education into an up-or-out pressure cooker that thinks nothing of, for example, firing the bottom performing 10% of people every year, or failing a student who's fifteen minutes late to a final exam, is not what we are built, cognitively/socially/culturally, to tolerate. These people are taking a norm that we DO make a formal attempt to force tolerance on, disability, and trying to extend it to get the system to treat them more like a human being and less like a competitor.
Let's take a more consensus trend: ADHD.
ADHD barely existed as a recognized social phenomenon until the 1990's.
> I didn’t realize how much of a psychiatrist’s time was spent gatekeeping Adderall.
> The human brain wasn’t built for accounting or software engineering. A few lucky people can do these things ten hours a day, every day, with a smile. The rest of us start fidgeting and checking our cell phone somewhere around the thirty minute mark. I work near the financial district of a big city, so every day a new Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers comes in and tells me that his brain must be broken because he can’t sit still and manipulate tiny numbers as much as he wants. How come this is so hard for him, when all of his colleagues can work so diligently?
> (it’s because his colleagues are all on Adderall already – but telling him that will just make things worse)
> He goes on to give me his story about how he’s at risk of getting fired from his Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers position, and at this rate he’s never going to get the promotion to Vice President Of Staring At Giant Spreadsheets, so do I think I can give him some Adderall to help him through?
> Psychiatric guidelines are very clear on this point: only give Adderall to people who “genuinely” “have” “ADHD”.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...
This one is widespread among the young people I’ve worked with recently. It’s remarkable how I can identify the current TikTok self diagnosis trends without ever watching TikTok.
There’s a widespread belief that once you put a label on a problem, other people are not allowed to criticize you for it. Many young people lean into this and label everything as a defensive tactic.
A while ago, one of the trends was “time blindness”. People who were chronically late, missed meetings, or failed to manage their time would see TikToks about “time blindness” as if it was a medical condition, and self-diagnose as having that.
It was bizarre to suddenly have people missing scheduled events and then casually informing me that they had time blindness, as if that made it okay. Once they had a label for a condition, they felt like they had a license to escape accountability.
The most frustrating part was that the people who self-diagnosed as having “time blindness” universally got worse at being on time. Once they had transformed the personal problem into a labeled condition, they didn’t feel as obligated to do anything about it.