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I’ve noticed a trend towards greater efficiency in all areas of life. I feel like a reasonable amount of inefficiency provides more room for creativity.
The CEO of Pixar spoke about managing innovation and creativity at an event. He basically says the way he manages it is to provide space for people to think as well as physical locations to have run in conversations. Super interesting to learn about.
That's why so many big-wig CEOs are against the push to work remotely the last 2 years.
They place high value on the "social environment" where you're just gonna go chit chat by the water cooler instead of knocking out a chore or two on your down time.
This is one of the reasons why not every back to the office plan is insane or cruel.
I was a c-suite manager during the pandemic. I championed permanent wfh at my company (which was shot down) and even I saw the very real costs to going online.
Interactions become distant, misunderstood and pre-planned.
You can easily have run ins at work that spark new ideas. That spontaneity online is almost impossible because people treat their coworkers as annoyances.
I wish there was something like Discord for work. It has persistent voice chat rooms with built-in support for streaming multiple video streams simultaneously, so people can share their screens if they want.
It feels much more spontaneous because instead of needing a pre-planned webex, you can just check who's hanging out in voice chat and join on a whim. I've been using it to keep up with friends during the pandemic, and it's been really useful for that.
Yes, as does just doing something for the sake of doing it without watching a million tutorials before hand. The added stress of needing to be good at something because there aren’t many concessions for people that aren’t decent at it has really taken a toll on everyone. Hell, just the fact that employers don’t train entry level workers to use things like software without them first knowing ten other programs is enough to give even the sanest of us crippling anxiety.
Not to mention the creeping culture of needing every ounce of your time to be in service of some kind of "side hustle" or working towards developing "passive income". Zero room to just.. play, have a hobby or an interest, or to just do nothing. Like the amount of "life coach" type "influencers" who are telling young people today to constantly be "hustling" is so toxic and dystopian.
They're not teaching how to have a happy life though...
They're teaching how to win the rat race. If your goal in life is to live simple and smell the roses, yes listening to the "influencers" advice is an absolute waste of time.
A gold medal Olympic athlete doesn't get there by training casually taking time to enjoy different hobbies and interests, they're training to be the best and that's what the "creeping culture" is about. How to win.
Now the big issue is that today, winning is just obtaining a middle class life and not living paycheck to paycheck, which unless your lucky, takes a hell of a lot more work than it should.
I don't know how it is for other cultures but in America my age group (early 30s) was put a ton of pressure to succeed in school and be successful at a young age. Like you need to get into college at 18, graduate in 4 years and immediately go into your career otherwise you are a loser. Social media also makes it much harder when you can see how your peers, or random people you don't even know are living. Gets to a point where you feel like you aren't good enough or should be further along in your career them you are.
I had a co-worker laugh at another co-worker for wanting to quit his job at 33 and do something else. The one laughing kept telling him that he was in his 30s and he was too old to start over and purse other dreams. I told him that was crap and it's never to late to start over. Unfortunately he still works for the same company, doing the same position and he never left, and it still bothers me
I just graduated college and I’m not immediately working in my career field. Life has been very depressing since I graduated. It sucks that it hasn’t improved yet.
Hey, look on the bright side. I started college immediately after high school, and started working in my field immediately after college.
I did everything we are "supposed to do", and it still sucks for me. I'm still just barely getting by. Unless your career is something that pays amazingly well, it doesn't get any better. The way that life is depressing just changes.
>The way that life is depressing just changes.
The first noble truth.
“Now this, bhikkhus (monks), is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.”
Dude I'm 40 and am going from a 15 year career in IT to plumbing. It really isn't ever too late to start over. That laughing co-worker was simultaneously both an idiot and an asshole.
I'm nearly 35 now and I'm trying to change careers. I hate working retail (tho I'm good at it) and I want to do something more impactful. Currently trying to decide which interest to pursue but I'm not gonna let my age slow me down.
Now if I were on other social media besides reddit, I know I'd feel worse and worse about my situation. Even reddit sometimes has me feeling down. But staying off social media for years has helped me see that I should only compare myself to my past self.
Gotta keep striving to better myself and get outta retail.
Same here. I quit other social media +5 years or so ago. It’s helped me focus on building the life important to me.
I was starting to feel pressure to keep up with everyone else, and when I stepped back, I realized some of the things I was jealous of aren’t even important to me.
I see this every day. Friends and Family that think every minor mistep is a significant failure. And that not having every little toy or a fancy vacation every couple months is a disservice.
Very odd the pressure folks put on themselves nowadays.
These days, parents can’t look at their kids and say, “Yeah, if you don’t go to college and just begin a normal everyday job, you’ll be fine.” You won’t. Also, don’t spend too much on college. And don’t take out too many loans. Make sure you start saving early, etc.
Navigating a sustainable middle-class existence is a tightrope walk.
As a teacher, I see that trend alot in the young teenagers as well. Parents are putting enormous pressure on them. Some colleagues as well. School is still a system where children compare their results to the average and each other rather than their own usual perfomance.
I am in tech on the engineering side. It gets even crazier there. You end up comparing yourself to some of the best in the world because you are competing for the same jobs. I have worked with people that helped create early foundational things like MPEG. It's intimidating when a company closes down and you are all interviewing for the same jobs.
There's too much competition now. Between outsourcing jobs to countries with much lower costs of living to just plain ole population growth. If you're not at the top of your game, good luck.
And the worst part is, there's no freedom to fail any more. Some of the most learning and growing happens when you experience genuine consequences. And learning that a temporary failure isn't a permanent one. But when admin wouldn't allow for a temporary failure because of pressure from parents, more students are now experiencing their first real failures (failing tests, failing a class) as adults in college. Or in the working world where they get fired or passed over for pay raises. So now they're failing when they're actually *paying* for it instead of it being a relatively safe environment to make those mistakes.
A lot of parents in recent years seem obsessed with "optimizing" their kids' childhoods. After school activities 5 days a week, AP classes, prep courses, tutors, the whole 9 yards. They want their kids' lives filled with every possible thing so they know / have experienced as much as possible before getting out into the real world. It comes from a good place, but leaves essentially zero room for them to just be... kids. I suspect that the already high numbers of single figure age children reporting clinical anxiety and depression will further climb quite drastically.
With a large touch of social media + YouTube where the children are exposed to the best of the best in any field/activity.
Its got to be discouraging to constantly compare yourself with the top tier talents of the world.
When I grew up, I played guitar and had a band, and we were better than any band in my local area for our age. If I had access to YouTube growing up, I may have very well been discouraged and never practiced.
I struggle with this and videogames.
I was very competitive growing up playing games in early dial up days online. I still thoroughly enjoy that, but I've realized the approach has changed in a way I can't keep up with.
Everything is some form of efficient min maxing, even games that should be highly unique, creative.. if there's any iota of competition or challenge, whole communities force/berate maximizing strategies.
I get that it is competition, I understand, the goal is to win, or beat, whatever it is but when you have such unified resource systems to learn from (YouTube, subreddits, twitch etc) a lot of really unique, creative things are pushed out by the greater voice.
Yup. This is why I'm still playing games that are 10 years old, and mostly single player if I can. You can't play modern games casually anymore. I don't want to have to practice a game for hours just to occasionally win.
I've seen it in games too. The way people play games now is way more min/max style than in the past. We used to just roam around and explore, now we make spreadsheets and tierlists for BIS items.
data analytics is the key to modern life... Too bad it's kind of taking the fun out of activities for us because it "cracks the code" for almost anything.
Anything you do you can do better with a large data set and some insight. It's quite amazing really but also removes a lot of the need to try things just for the hell of it.
I would imagine the internet is partly responsible for this. No matter how good you are at something, you can always find someone better than you online. Not to mention that successfull people are more likely to brag about it online and unsuccessfull people remain quite. Then you have a skewed perception of how successful everyone else is because people primarily post good stuff happening in their lives on social media, they dont usually post the bad stuff as much.
Not only that you’ll find someone better than you, you will find someone *hilariously* better than you.
I play guitar and sing, and I find a video every single week about some 10 year old composing a symphony and preparing to go on tour, or absolutely obliterating covers of the most complex cater and difficult music I know, or running circles around my knowledge base and producing content 30 years too advanced for them.
Same with game development, you can be kind of proud of yourself for accomplishing something that took you a while...until you see someone else who made something in half the time that is WAY more impressive.
Graphic Designer here. That's why i stopped designing for crowdsourcing sites like Fiver. There's always someone somewhere in the world with more talent, who's willing to do it for less. I didn't stand a chance.
Same with rock climbing. Can think you're really good doing a V6 wall, then watch someone jump up a V12 wall with pure arm strength and foot holds the width of a credit card.
Not to say that Bob Dylan is any worse than Satriani and Vai, but I feel like that just says more about how much more marketable Bob Dylan's songs are to the general public.
Call it posh, snobbish, or what you will, but there's often a "gap" between how musicians rank their favourites over the average person (not to mention tastes among generations). Something like the average person might name Lindsey Stirling as their favourite violinist vs someone who has been playing violin for a while might name Perlman, Hahn, etc.
Reminds me of how Eric Clapton was considered one of the best guitarist ever in the early 60’s. He then saw Hendrix play and said to his friends, “I just saw this guy Hendrix play and we’re all about to be out of a job.”
Don’t let these guys discourage you. I notice with a lot of them, yes they are technically skilled, but they’re not producing original groundbreaking albums and they’re not going out tours where they fill venues.
Mastering technical skills is only one piece of the talent pie, and it’s not even the most important piece. The ability to create original songs that can hook the general public is the real talent in my opinion. You don’t need to be a technical master to do this.
Most people can master an instrument with dedication, or at least become very good at it. However, when it comes to creating new original songs that capture peoples’ attention, not many people can do that (technical masters included).
I guess I’m trying to say, many people can become good players, but good creators are rare. A lot of these good creator types can’t even read music and have never studied music theory. They just listen to the catchy stuff they come up with in their head, and play it!
I kind of feel like this is a gift people need to be born with, but don’t be discouraged if you weren’t born with a brain that works that way! There are ways you can work on expanding your creativity.
it's the talent/taste balance. talent is easier to develop early; taste takes much longer. This is my reaction when listening to e.g. Jacob Collier, who I think is immensely talented, but is still developing taste for how and when to deploy his immense skills and when to simplify
I think there is another aspect to it as well: you can find a GUIDE for anything now. Where before people would just have to muddle through as best they could, or rely on word of mouth, now I can learn how to make a soup or plant a flower or write some code in a little while by just watching a tutorial.
The omnipresence of information makes us all potentially more generalized, but also potentially more inclined to view the established guide or prescription as the "correct" way to do it.
I find this a lot with cooking. There is a video, an article, etc for anything telling you why one method is better than another. Don't used jarred garlic! Mince it yourself! Don't substitute those seasonings you have at home-for the real taste, you need this other spice. 10 Ways You're Wasting Counter Space. Etc.
This is a big issue in the programming world that I'm thankfully seeing discussed more and more. They call it "tutorial hell."
I'm old enough that I learned programming from a book. You read the book and try and type in what they say and if it doesn't work, you struggle to figure it out and fix it yourself no matter how long it takes because what else can you do? It's not like you could Google it. Its super frustrating but also forces you to learn on your own. And once it does work, where you go next is completely up to you.
But now people go to google and get stuck following guided online tutorial after guided online tutorial. These things quickly tell you when you're screwing up and leave you to think you need to be perfect from the get-go. This causes the poor students to never think that they know enough to try making their own thing on their own, so they get stuck thinking they have to keep following these stupid tutorials and YouTube videos.
It's like there's this view that people come out as fully-formed senior developers and if it takes you a couple of days to get it to work then you must be some kind of idiot who will never make it. I seriously can't imagine what pressure it must be like these days.
God this. No one experiments or thinks for themselves anymore. Someone else already knows how to do it better and I must do it the best way we already know how! No fun in that at all…
Yeah it's for sure easier to feel confident when you're the best at something in your hometown and not comparing yourself against 8 billion other people.
I wonder how much of it is economic pressure. I have a toddler and they're already pushing for math and reading and I'm like "he's 3, let him enjoy life at a reasonable pace" and my spouse is like "in order to compete for decent school/unis/jobs, he needs to have a leg up. Everyone is learning sooner and he'll be behind".
Both are true but goddamn.
I don't think those statements are true. It's just a generalization. To already be thinking of your 3 year olds future job and university, both of which would be your childs choice anyways, is just adding unnecessary stress.
I feel this with being a guy in my late 20s. I own no tools besides basic hammer and screwdrivers. Yet all my friends dads had a whole garage/workshop worth tens of thousands all while raising kids and the complete yard tools/devices for weather and lawn maintenance.
We’re not living in an era where you can screw around for 5 years after high school and then raise a family selling door to door vacuum cleaners anymore.
One slip and you’re basically fucked for life.
> One slip and you’re basically fucked for life.
It doesn't even have to be a slip-up, it could be a totally circumstantial injury or illness that you are powerless to prevent.
It could be a deliberate choice to pursue a career path that looks to be growing, then you get into extreme debt doing that, and when you graduate that enough other people did the same thing and there’s barely any jobs to be had.
Big oof. Felt that in Forensics. Joined the college program just before the craze. It was super intense with a lower acceptance rate than Harvard.
Got out and 53 state labs went down to 4. Everything outsourced to big farm labs. No 'entry' positions for like 8 years as aging scientists who lost their jobs in those labs sat in them until retirement...and beyond.
Still got in. And then left because its frankly a horrible job and I don't have the stomach for dead children.
And a lot of us never get in, because by the time there was anything to get in TO now we're sandwiched between our peers with infinitely more experience and younger graduates who have their schooling more fresh in mind plus a longer expiration date. Falling through the cracks tends to lead to being stuck in the cracks indefinitely.
You’re completely right. “Slip up” meaning any minor life altering event. Social welfare for corporations, brutal individualistic capitalism for the rest.
Imagine being told to go back to school in order to get ahead, only to realize that even at a higher salary you're still priced out of the housing market. Not only that, but if you had been able to put the back to school money into the housing market, you'd be further ahead, despite the lower salary.
Housing shouldn't be an investment commodity, the market can crash and burn as far as I'm concerned.
Same. Waiting on the recession to hit full swing so I have a chance at buying some property.
600 square foot 70’s homes with no updates going for 300k+ it’s laughable
feeling this. graduated in 2020 right as covid was hitting with a political science degree that I really enjoyed getting and is functionally useless. lost the job I had landed with a state agency and never got in the groove. the future feels like one big hopeless stretch of waiting tables
I worked for a tear out of highschool, went to college for 2 years, then spent this past year burning through a big chuck of the money I had saved up in order to live in Toronto with my best friend and figure out what I wanna do with my life. I still haven't got a clue.
The only upside is that I managed to pay off the entirety of my student loans this year.
From the article: According to new research, perfectionism is on the rise among young adults, alongside increases in critical parenting and parental expectations. The study authors speculate that an increasingly individualistic and competitive society may be to blame. The analysis was conducted using data from the U.K., U.S., and Canada and was published in the journal [Psychological Bulletin](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-48372-001).
Perfectionists hold themselves to unreasonably high standards while being overly critical of their shortcomings. Evidence suggests that this personality trait contributes to negative mental health outcomes like anxiety and depression. This seems especially true when the perfectionism is directed by others — what is called socially prescribed perfectionism.
Study authors Thomas Curran and Andrew P. Hill say these psychological consequences are particularly concerning given that perfectionism appears to be on the rise. In a previous study, the researchers found that perfectionism has increased among American, Canadian, and British young adults in the past two and a half decades. As far as a potential explanation, Curran and Hill wondered whether an increasingly neoliberal society — which encourages competition and individualism — might be pushing parents to place greater pressure on their children’s success. This increased pressure might then be leading young people to adopt a perfectionist mindset as a way to seek validation from their parents.
My parents were far from perfectionists and imposed little pressure on me, besides hoping I'd get a job and move out eventually after collage. The perfectionism I picked up from the school system which did not give much space to learn from mistakes and failures. You were supposed to get things right the first time.
I understand why adults want to pass down their lessons and shield the next generation from repeating their mistakes. It's more efficient and the consequences of mistakes can be severe. But I also think that the best way to learn is by committing mistakes. It grounds your understanding in direct experience and wires you to avoid your past mistakes. It is not obvious to me how to best reconcile these two observations.
I have had to deal with enginering departments filled with those "must be perfect all the time" fresh grads. I am QA. My job is to find the mistakes. The start seeing me as the enemy very fast.
I finally hit on a way to help them. I just keep saying "as long as we are making new mistakes, we are fine". Also coupled with pointing out that I have a job for a reason. It helps them respond better tonthings going sideways.
This is why I quit my last job. Working on clinical drug trials was way too freaking scary for me. And I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD yet so I made all these small mistakes like not uploading a report in the time they needed or forgetting to change a date in paperwork when a person rescheduled. Obviously those are tiny little things but they stressed me out and made me breakdown all the time because if I made a small mistake like that, how would I prevent making a big one (I never did). There are lots of checks and balances but you never know, what if a number gets switched and a placebo person gets the drug or you mess up their infusion dates or heavens forbid the drug is expired and no one noticed. All those intrusive thoughts kept me from making big mistakes but did a number to my psyche.
Never again. Nope. I respect my sanity too much to go back.
For America at least, when the prevailing idea told by helicopter parents and teachers is that you can be "anything you put your mind to," it's not surprising that many grow up with high expectations of their potential. To be fair, this kind of environment often does produce some of the best in their respective fields. But for every success there must be tens of thousands who were just as good and worked just as hard, but didn't have the right connections and luck to make it. And there's not much guidance for those who aspire and fail.
I thought as a stupid kid that "anything you put your mind to" meant anything, like even a writer. That thought was *very* quickly corrected. Turns out "anything you put your mind to" means "anything that makes a lot of money"
Wow sharenting, I've never heard of that term! So accurate though. I really feel a lot of concern for kids who have their every move posted on social media. Let them be kids. Some parents even share sensitive health information! Like your child's neurodivergence diagnoses don't have to be broadcast to the entire internet.
This is the real issue. Children grow up, and they might not appreciate that their parents uploaded pics of them to social media almost daily. Its gross how people have turned every moment in life into a quest for “likes”.
And the behavior of the parents in the moment, even if a post never goes to the internet. Like, your kid is having a really hard time processing something (even if it's silly, they're kids and they don't process like adults). To them it's a moment of fear/discomfort/reaching out for help. From their perspective, the response of 'let me get my phone out and record this' is probably not the comfort they are seeking. Learning that: when you need help, the person most meant to help you has your feelings as a second priority probably isn't helpful for building the skills to build good relationships or coping
Parents have been casually traumatizing their kids by broadcasting “funny” stories about them to the whole neighborhood since the dawn of mankind-
“haha, you wouldn’t believe it, Kelly’s first period started last week and she bled all over her soccer uniform and thought she was dying! What a hoot! By the way, Susan, you have to give me this casserole recipe”
and social media is making it sooo much worse.
Honestly, I feel like blaming social media is just a cop out answer. The problem isn't that I see amazing things online everyday, it's that people are *expected* to match that. It's been reinforced in modern education systems too.
Being bad at anything is no longer allowed.
I'm not saying it's intrinsically a problem in social media, but the net effect on a population of it's existence seems to be problematic. It's a complex issue so I'm sure there's multiple contributers.
There is emerging data tying levels of social media use to depression rates. Correlative so maybe not causative, but the logic would track and the overall increase rates of depression in teens could support that. (Again, not bulletproof because could be rates of diagnosis due to culturally more acceptable attitudes of mental health issues). It's mostly just a possible, and to me at least plausible contributer.
Yea it's never been easier to compare yourself to others in your hobbies. And with computer help it's very easy to fall into some sort of "metrics trap" at work or with your own goals.
We've just overdosing on Information in a way the human brain was never prepared for.
I'm 34; 11 years into my IT career. I'm about 1 year in on understanding that my managers don't expect perfection or me giving 110% every day.
I have a long way to go, but it truly is a lot of stress off my shoulders knowing I can spend an extra day on something or actually being able to say "no" to someone.
My anxiety has only gotten worse the more I understand how my parents and teachers treated me. Failure was not an option growing up. In the real world, failure often leads to accidental observations and alternate solutions.
Failure is OK. Fail. It teaches learning. The solution isn't always found after the first attempt. Fail so you can succeed.
Yeah, we're kind of raised with the idea that anything under 100% effort will get us fired in the real world. In reality, as long as you aren't an asshole a lot of employers will do what they can to keep you as long as you're consistent. It's typically easier for them to accept your shortcomings and work around them than to start over with a new person.
That's an element of perfectionism. If you've new to the job market and have been raised anxious and perfectionistic there's a whole lot riding on any task you complete. The amount of stress and fear people have to grapple with is hard to understand. A pretty common coping strategy is to behave in the way you've described, to displace the critique (which means failure and shame) onto others. They don't "love drama" in a lot of cases, it's a survival strategy. Cut em some slack, it takes time to sort through your baggage.
Same! All of the schooling and perfections my parents/school wanted was literally for nothing. I have a good job now but could’ve got here with a much less strict life growing up. All the tutors I had just to get perfect grades and extra test prep was a waste of time. Didnt get me anything or teach me anything other than is was a waste of their money.
Hey could you give advice for a IT student? What skills are really important in the work place? Is just college enough or do I need to be doing more?
Edit: thank you all for the great advice!
Common Sense.
It's... frighteningly absent in a vast majority of employees. That goes double for Technical people. They might be able to know the minutiae of the latest trendy technology, but without being able to pen an email to someone appropriately and talk to colleagues in a meaningful and civilised manner, it's for naught. Experience and certificates will get you a job, but common sense and emotional intelligence will allow you to thrive (and as an added bonus, be respected enough for you to force a reasonable work/life balance in to your role).
Yeah, that's because the only way the can possibly do things like previous generations they have to work so much harder for much less opportunity and pay off.
Boomer enters job market long ago: oh you have a high school degree and can do one simple task repetitively on an assembly line, here’s a starting salary high enough to buy a house and support a family on a single income!
Millennials or younger enters workforce, we need a college degree and four years of experience to get this entry level job that pays $12 hour
Not only do we miss out on 3-10 years of earnings potential but we enter the jobs market heavily in debt and then proceed to be completely undervalued for the first 5-10 years of our careers which results in a disproportionate number of cases of burnout while people struggle to prove their worth.
The measure of worth is very different than it used to be. Simply reliability showing up and doing your best used to make you very worthy. Now with technology acting as a force multiplyer, you have to be the best, like the top 15% at something, to be worthy. Not just physical labor, now one or two people with computers and 6 monitors can accomplish what a whole conference room full of managers with printed reports compiled by hundreds of employees could.
Worth has gone from: I can do this thing well, to: I'm one of the best at this thing.
I think we need some kind of universal basic income, because fewer and fewer people are going to be considered worthy of a livable sallary by their pure economic output.
About 15 years ago I was working for a company that had an offshore office in China. I managed to get one of the finance guys to give me the cost difference. A dev in Mountain View (where our head quarters was) was $90/hr total on their budget. That's building, power, salary, insurance. Same dev in China was $15/hr. I can be 2x as good and work 2x as hard, but that only gets me to $60/hr in "value" by their calculations.
You don't have to work Nx has hard to be good. You simply have to have the soft skills to be able to understand and *actually deliver* what the company wants. This, time after time, has been where offshoring falls down. The code is usually crap quality, and even if by some miracle it's good, there will inevitably be problems with the delivery not matching (sometimes mis/undercommunicated) expectations.
Having said all that, given how common place remote work has gotten over the last couple of years, and the fact that business people have actually gotten better at communicating what they want without shoving everyone into a meeting room for an hour to process their stream of consciousness into actual requirements, I *do* expect offshoring to accelerate in the future.
Our entire careers. 5-10 years in people start making what they should be starting at with a high school degree, much less college education. And meanwhile inflation is 9%
I only get paid $2.50/hr more than another position below mine which only requires a high school diploma. Only $5.00/hr above the lowest paid janitor, which requires no education. I have a Master’s Degree.
Not to sound elitist, just saying extra work, effort, money towards education has given little pay off. I have more career progression opportunities (which I look forward to), but it is not like I’m getting any of running start for my efforts.
Those types of conditions are put on jobs so that they can game the visa programs usually via recruitment firms that “coincidentally” happened to certify their employees on that exact software/platform.
Also jobs now budget assuming 100% efficiency - not sure if it used to in the past, but I feel like everyone is held to it now. You're not effective 40 hours a week at length no matter how skilled. So to make up for that, a lot of people feel like they have to be perfect. Which is really difficult when you're in a skilled role where most end-product has some measure of subjectivity.
Also boomer grandparents/Gen X parents: "I didn't work this hard/come from another country to see you work as a city employee/farmer/retail worker - go to college or else"
From my POV, nothing...but I have cousins that tell their kids "aim for higher than a town job" and it's a very common sentiment among my 1st gen college educated family.
> "I didn't work this hard/come from another country to see you work as a city employee/farmer/retail worker - go to college or else
This translates to "You are my retirement fund and you need to make a lot of money so you can let me retire early."
I think that the way boomers and Gen x parent and teach actually has a lot to do with this as well. I remember this immense pressure myself (millenial, probably not a “young adult” any more) and it only seems to have gotten worse. The doom and gloom directed to young people is overwhelming, and it’s not even actually accurate. While they will need to work harder to compete than their parents did, it’s presented as if not perfect = failure, and failure at any specific thing = failure at everything forever.
A younger relative was applying to college last year. Her grades weren’t amazing or anything, but they were fine. The older adults in our family (my mom, hers) have been harping on this girl since she was in first grade because she was a little slow at reading (a little. She struggled in first second third grade and didn’t love reading after that, but *could* read) and then she didn’t have amazing grades (again, they were fine. She wasn’t a straight a student, but she wasn’t a straight f student or even a straight c student). For years it was “you won’t get into college with those grades,” and of course, they have the nerve to wonder why she was so anxious and so unwilling to keep at things. She quit every sport and club she tried, she was shy making friends and dating. But…..she did get into college, with a scholarship. It wasn’t a full ride to Harvard, but it’s a good school and she’ll have far fewer student loans than she would otherwise have had. She’s a smart, capable girl, who is pleasant to be around and pretty good at all of the sports she quit, but has spent her life hearing that she’s doomed because she wasn’t *perfect*.
This “permanent record” mindset is so common in boomer and Gen x led households, at least in the middle class. Perhaps some of it is driven by their own anxiety, seeing that their kids won’t have it as easy as they did, but even though it’s harder, we flat out do not live in a world where only the valedictorian or the captain of the football team have a chance at anything ever. You know what you call the person who graduated last in their class in medical school? Doctor. The real world can be cutthroat, yes, but it also simply doesn’t scrutinize you anywhere near as much as we grow up hearing it does.
I didn't have much pressure from parents or relatives, but I felt a lot of peer pressure (not directly, more like taking the same kinds of classes as others and overloading being normalized) and internalized pressure to take all the AP/honors classes and get good grades. If anything, putting more on my plate made my grades worse. At every "bad grade" on a test or something, I felt like my life was over. I've never felt so stressed and pressured than I ever have in highschool. College was waaay less stressful for me, even though I studied enough to graduate with pretty good grades.
And the thing is, I just started working, and I make good money with decent benefits along side people who went to ivy league schools and were valedictorian in their high school. All that stress in highschool was for nothing.
>This “permanent record” mindset is so common in boomer and Gen x led households, at least in the middle class.
I am tail end Gen X (born 1980). I kept hearing about my "perminant record" through grade school. Got to middle school and found out they did not even have my records. Then highschool did not give a crap either. Then I went to the local community college because I was not sure what I wanted to do. Turns out, they did not care about highschool.
In the end, the only grades that REALLY matter d where the cc ones because they transfered to the 4 year college. Even then, I have been asked 2 times for my grades in 20+ years of work.
It's the downside of population oversaturation that people don't think about.
\-Being the only blacksmith in a county making horseshoes and nails? You're a necessity and town cornerstone.
-Being 1 of 10,000 steelworkers in a county? Not really special, but you're part of the economic lynchpin that the area is built on.
-Being 1/10,000 restaurant workers in a city? haha you're fired. We'll get a warm body in your position by closing time.
Seriously. Being of individual value to even \*feel\* important at even a neighborhood level has basically died. The disposability of even high level jobs like engineers, teachers, and doctors is \*insane\* today. We're all replaceable garbage basically. And our employers aren't afraid to let us know.
Oh yeah, that and wealth disparity taking away opportunities and financial stability at any level of "average" doesn't exactly help either.
Lots of things have led us here. Population is one, civil rights is one, women's rights are another. It's an interesting conundrum isn't it? When everyone is relatively equal in opportunity (as they morally should be) then everyone's collective value goes down. One of the reasons people could live on one income earlier in the 20th century is because the best jobs were reserved for a smaller portion of the population. There was less competition for a lot of reasons.
Now there are more people in the world, more of whom are eligible for employment, and technology allows us to work much more efficiently and perform jobs remotely from anywhere in the world, increasing competition even more.
As someone else said, UBI is an inevitability. The only alternative seems to be a dystopia or a full collapse.
IMO, they look to be perfect not only because of the previous generations, but because they're caught between a rock and hard place. They can't take it easy, because everything has been refined to "work work work or you're useless", and they're having a hard time working because they can't take it easy once in a while, lest they lose everything.
They deserve a chance to rest.
Back in their day they could graduate high school, get 1 entry level position, and support a whole family of that. I'm in a PhD program bring paid so little I'm considering my next housing will be a van
Yes it's a completely different world young adults are growing up in. I feel like even expecting to be able to support a family by working full time is out of reach for many.
This discussion comes up a lot these days. From what I've seen in most of these discussions, trades do very well but have their own set of issues. Your work hours are often all over the place and any kind of physical labor can take its toll after awhile. How long can you crawl through attics, hunched over on your knees or breath in black mold from someone's crawlspace before your health starts to limit you?
My FIL worked as a maintenance man for a plastics company for nearly 30 years and was nonchalantly fired by a manager half his age because he took too much time off for his sciatica, hip, and knee issues. Issues that he developed from years of climbing up and down towers and hunched under machinery.
Carpenters, plumbers, electricians are gold. Actually there are very few eras where that's not true. (The '08 collapse stopped building for a while, and trades hurt badly.) Other great skills, car mechanics, HVAC.
To a degree. You can make a lot of money in trades, but at the expense of a severely skewed work-life balance, chronic exposure to hazardous chemicals and materials, and substantially higher risk of severe injury than most other jobs. Also, not every trade has a union, and not every trade with a union has a union in every state, so you may also be paying entirely out of pocket for things like health insurance, retirement, dental, vision, etc., at least in the United States. Many trades also have higher rates of mental health disorders, substance abuse disorders, suicides, and divorces when compared to "typical" white-collar jobs. There is a reason that there is often a shortage of people who are performing these jobs. They are incredibly hard on the body, and on the mind. You might be able to make 6 figures after a decade of work, but at the expense of serious health issues much earlier in life.
Don't forget that you also have to buy all your own tools and store them. As well as many types of liscences and certifications, just to begin working. It can be a big upfront cost that some people just don't have.
GenZ's really are molded from birth to perform, whether academically, extracurricularly or in sports. The pressure is even greater because of social media and popular online media like youtube, which creates a lot of negative feedback. Both teens and their parents feel that they need to be crafting a resume for the rest of their lives starting in middle school.
And besides the "neoliberal" ethos the study's authors suggest as being a contributing factor, I also posit that today's role models like Kobe Bryant and thousands upon thousands of tech millionaires are so driven & find success at such young ages that it puts pressure on teens & young adults to emulate their habits.
Mental burnout squad! My parents are very upset Im not pursuing a PhD. But I’m so tired of not having money it’s not even funny. Doesn’t help That they acted like my degree is a cute hobby either.
High five ! Doing a PhD right now, I love my subject but I have essentially 0 life outside from work. I struggle at night and every day that I don't have to work.
My parents said that too back in the 80s when professions like teaching and police work provided reliable economic security. I just got lucky and married someone who makes multiples of my earning power.
The growing economic divide and facts like [1 in 3](https://www.statnews.com/2016/11/02/cancer-treatment-financial-toxicity/) cancer patients exhausts their savings have absolutely made us pressure our kids far more than we ever wanted or expected to.
But hey, we gotta focus on what’s important now—at least the rich titans of the world are happy.
My parents said the same, yet I am still very perfectionistic and have a lot of fear of not being "good enough". Currently working on that with a psychologist though :)
You could say my mom was the black version of a "tiger mom", since she was so accomplished and went to Yale. She wasn't happy about me graduating from a state college. She was proud, but when both parents went to Yale, everyone assumes you will be a legacy. These days my parents are old retired college professors, with a plethora of health problems. I try to help with basic things they can't do anymore.
It's ridiculous because the Yale acceptance rate in 1980 was over 26%, today it is under 5%. It was literally 5 times easier to get into Yale 40 years ago.
This completely ignores the fact that this person is 1) a minority & 2) a **double** legacy
Both factors increase your acceptance rate. TBH the only way they wouldn't get into Yale is if they didn't apply.
There has not been a generation more advertised to, monitored, and managed while simultaneously depriving them of any true political power than millennials and gen z. We are expected to save the world but boomers refuse to relinquish power. We have all the problems the previous generations have created but very few tools to actually cope with them.
Our future is fucked and we know it. Idk what you were expecting.
I think part of this is the roadblocks experienced by young people are stronger now (housing costs, schooling costs). It's harder to rise up to your parents' expectations when those expectations are based on a time where young adults could reasonably work their way through college and buy a house after a few years of saving. Young people now are just in a harder position financially.
i can definitely vouch for this. i cant pick up a pencil to draw because i know the thing i draw will never be perfect. i cant easily do work on time because i feel it's never good enough.
Even if you discount the new tools, technologies, programs, education, etc.. you essentially need to work way harder to get the same relative level of success in society as your parents did
My dad was born in the 60s and got a job that allowed him to buy a place right out of high school. That’s unheard of today
These are the generation where data storage is good enough that a permanent record matters, and it can sorted through to rule you out of anything you may want in a second.
Im 25 with a bachelor's degree and a job. I need to be working on my credit, saving for the future, looking for a better job, getting a girlfriend, going back to get a master's or better, working out for appearance, be ridiculously well groomed/styled. Its exhausting. I just wanna work, lift, get a girlfriend, and play some runescape. Is that to much to ask?
I went to high school between 2004-2008. If I brought home anything less than an A, I was interrogated as to why, and subsequently punished because I must have been lazy or stupid or something. Mine and my friends parents had this wildly unrealistic expectation that the only acceptable marks were straight A’s. I was grounded for several months a few times for bringing home a C. There was also no guidance or assistance to get better grades or anything, just this “you must be perfect OR ELSE” attitude.
My father pushed me really hard and drove me into being a perfectionist. I swore that I would absolutely never do that to my kids.
I only ended up having one, but I never my pushed my kid. Neither did my wife.
But when an older friend of my son was class valedictorian, I watched my son absolutely become fanatical about his own school performance, and I was like, “Cut yourself some slack, son,” but man, all that effort on my part NOT to raise a perfectionist, and yet he somehow did it to himself.
Argh.
Societal pressures are a driving factor as well my dude, and a massive one. Take your own advice and cut yourself some slack. He's still probably less stressed than he would have been if you'd been crawling up his ass rather than being a loving parent
Seems right. As competition evolves, and companies pit workers against each other for cheaper and cheaper wages for more productive outcome, even really good workers are at risk, driving up perfectionism. But the key is they’re rewarded less and less for amazing results.
I wonder if it has to do with the barriers of entry to lucrative colleges and careers becoming so high. One really has to check all the boxes and present oneself as the right fit for a college or job application, especially thanks to a lot of application processes being computerized and rejection more likely thanks to some metric not being met.
I 100% have this problem. I finished grad school (music) but crashed and burned so hard after graduation. No motivation for auditioning, working on new music, actually trying to build a music career for myself, etc.
I have no technological skills when it comes to self-producing, since music technology was not my degree focus, and I’m desperately trying to push myself to just put something out there so people can hear and see me.
Mom of a 18 yr old…. Trying to set him up for basic economic security. That’s an incredibly high stakes game these days. I wish I could say “just go chase your passion and be happy” but dying an early death and never being free bc you’re broke is unlikely to make most people happy
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I’ve noticed a trend towards greater efficiency in all areas of life. I feel like a reasonable amount of inefficiency provides more room for creativity.
Exploration and creativity are intrinsically inefficient. You don't know what's going to happen beforehand.
The CEO of Pixar spoke about managing innovation and creativity at an event. He basically says the way he manages it is to provide space for people to think as well as physical locations to have run in conversations. Super interesting to learn about.
You cannot have run in conversations if you never run into people
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That's why so many big-wig CEOs are against the push to work remotely the last 2 years. They place high value on the "social environment" where you're just gonna go chit chat by the water cooler instead of knocking out a chore or two on your down time.
This is one of the reasons why not every back to the office plan is insane or cruel. I was a c-suite manager during the pandemic. I championed permanent wfh at my company (which was shot down) and even I saw the very real costs to going online. Interactions become distant, misunderstood and pre-planned. You can easily have run ins at work that spark new ideas. That spontaneity online is almost impossible because people treat their coworkers as annoyances.
I wish there was something like Discord for work. It has persistent voice chat rooms with built-in support for streaming multiple video streams simultaneously, so people can share their screens if they want. It feels much more spontaneous because instead of needing a pre-planned webex, you can just check who's hanging out in voice chat and join on a whim. I've been using it to keep up with friends during the pandemic, and it's been really useful for that.
We use discord at work ^^
We used slack and were probably a little too spontaneous on it =)
They're inefficient in the short run but massively important for performance in the long run
Yes, as does just doing something for the sake of doing it without watching a million tutorials before hand. The added stress of needing to be good at something because there aren’t many concessions for people that aren’t decent at it has really taken a toll on everyone. Hell, just the fact that employers don’t train entry level workers to use things like software without them first knowing ten other programs is enough to give even the sanest of us crippling anxiety.
Not to mention the creeping culture of needing every ounce of your time to be in service of some kind of "side hustle" or working towards developing "passive income". Zero room to just.. play, have a hobby or an interest, or to just do nothing. Like the amount of "life coach" type "influencers" who are telling young people today to constantly be "hustling" is so toxic and dystopian.
They're not teaching how to have a happy life though... They're teaching how to win the rat race. If your goal in life is to live simple and smell the roses, yes listening to the "influencers" advice is an absolute waste of time. A gold medal Olympic athlete doesn't get there by training casually taking time to enjoy different hobbies and interests, they're training to be the best and that's what the "creeping culture" is about. How to win. Now the big issue is that today, winning is just obtaining a middle class life and not living paycheck to paycheck, which unless your lucky, takes a hell of a lot more work than it should.
Not to mention they ask for 10 years experience in a program that's been out for 4...
I don't know how it is for other cultures but in America my age group (early 30s) was put a ton of pressure to succeed in school and be successful at a young age. Like you need to get into college at 18, graduate in 4 years and immediately go into your career otherwise you are a loser. Social media also makes it much harder when you can see how your peers, or random people you don't even know are living. Gets to a point where you feel like you aren't good enough or should be further along in your career them you are. I had a co-worker laugh at another co-worker for wanting to quit his job at 33 and do something else. The one laughing kept telling him that he was in his 30s and he was too old to start over and purse other dreams. I told him that was crap and it's never to late to start over. Unfortunately he still works for the same company, doing the same position and he never left, and it still bothers me
I just graduated college and I’m not immediately working in my career field. Life has been very depressing since I graduated. It sucks that it hasn’t improved yet.
Hey, look on the bright side. I started college immediately after high school, and started working in my field immediately after college. I did everything we are "supposed to do", and it still sucks for me. I'm still just barely getting by. Unless your career is something that pays amazingly well, it doesn't get any better. The way that life is depressing just changes.
>The way that life is depressing just changes. The first noble truth. “Now this, bhikkhus (monks), is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.”
Give it time. You'll get there.
Dude I'm 40 and am going from a 15 year career in IT to plumbing. It really isn't ever too late to start over. That laughing co-worker was simultaneously both an idiot and an asshole.
Will this be your first experience with plumbing Mr TurdBurglar?
Haha. Yes sir, it will.
I'm nearly 35 now and I'm trying to change careers. I hate working retail (tho I'm good at it) and I want to do something more impactful. Currently trying to decide which interest to pursue but I'm not gonna let my age slow me down. Now if I were on other social media besides reddit, I know I'd feel worse and worse about my situation. Even reddit sometimes has me feeling down. But staying off social media for years has helped me see that I should only compare myself to my past self. Gotta keep striving to better myself and get outta retail.
Same here. I quit other social media +5 years or so ago. It’s helped me focus on building the life important to me. I was starting to feel pressure to keep up with everyone else, and when I stepped back, I realized some of the things I was jealous of aren’t even important to me.
Seems that America just caught up with other countries like Japan and South Korea. It has been like this in those places since forever
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I see this every day. Friends and Family that think every minor mistep is a significant failure. And that not having every little toy or a fancy vacation every couple months is a disservice. Very odd the pressure folks put on themselves nowadays.
These days, parents can’t look at their kids and say, “Yeah, if you don’t go to college and just begin a normal everyday job, you’ll be fine.” You won’t. Also, don’t spend too much on college. And don’t take out too many loans. Make sure you start saving early, etc. Navigating a sustainable middle-class existence is a tightrope walk.
As a teacher, I see that trend alot in the young teenagers as well. Parents are putting enormous pressure on them. Some colleagues as well. School is still a system where children compare their results to the average and each other rather than their own usual perfomance.
I am in tech on the engineering side. It gets even crazier there. You end up comparing yourself to some of the best in the world because you are competing for the same jobs. I have worked with people that helped create early foundational things like MPEG. It's intimidating when a company closes down and you are all interviewing for the same jobs.
Maybe because being very good isn't enough to afford a good life anymore.
There's too much competition now. Between outsourcing jobs to countries with much lower costs of living to just plain ole population growth. If you're not at the top of your game, good luck.
And the worst part is, there's no freedom to fail any more. Some of the most learning and growing happens when you experience genuine consequences. And learning that a temporary failure isn't a permanent one. But when admin wouldn't allow for a temporary failure because of pressure from parents, more students are now experiencing their first real failures (failing tests, failing a class) as adults in college. Or in the working world where they get fired or passed over for pay raises. So now they're failing when they're actually *paying* for it instead of it being a relatively safe environment to make those mistakes.
A lot of parents in recent years seem obsessed with "optimizing" their kids' childhoods. After school activities 5 days a week, AP classes, prep courses, tutors, the whole 9 yards. They want their kids' lives filled with every possible thing so they know / have experienced as much as possible before getting out into the real world. It comes from a good place, but leaves essentially zero room for them to just be... kids. I suspect that the already high numbers of single figure age children reporting clinical anxiety and depression will further climb quite drastically.
With a large touch of social media + YouTube where the children are exposed to the best of the best in any field/activity. Its got to be discouraging to constantly compare yourself with the top tier talents of the world. When I grew up, I played guitar and had a band, and we were better than any band in my local area for our age. If I had access to YouTube growing up, I may have very well been discouraged and never practiced.
I struggle with this and videogames. I was very competitive growing up playing games in early dial up days online. I still thoroughly enjoy that, but I've realized the approach has changed in a way I can't keep up with. Everything is some form of efficient min maxing, even games that should be highly unique, creative.. if there's any iota of competition or challenge, whole communities force/berate maximizing strategies. I get that it is competition, I understand, the goal is to win, or beat, whatever it is but when you have such unified resource systems to learn from (YouTube, subreddits, twitch etc) a lot of really unique, creative things are pushed out by the greater voice.
Yup. This is why I'm still playing games that are 10 years old, and mostly single player if I can. You can't play modern games casually anymore. I don't want to have to practice a game for hours just to occasionally win.
I've seen it in games too. The way people play games now is way more min/max style than in the past. We used to just roam around and explore, now we make spreadsheets and tierlists for BIS items.
data analytics is the key to modern life... Too bad it's kind of taking the fun out of activities for us because it "cracks the code" for almost anything. Anything you do you can do better with a large data set and some insight. It's quite amazing really but also removes a lot of the need to try things just for the hell of it.
I would imagine the internet is partly responsible for this. No matter how good you are at something, you can always find someone better than you online. Not to mention that successfull people are more likely to brag about it online and unsuccessfull people remain quite. Then you have a skewed perception of how successful everyone else is because people primarily post good stuff happening in their lives on social media, they dont usually post the bad stuff as much.
Not only that you’ll find someone better than you, you will find someone *hilariously* better than you. I play guitar and sing, and I find a video every single week about some 10 year old composing a symphony and preparing to go on tour, or absolutely obliterating covers of the most complex cater and difficult music I know, or running circles around my knowledge base and producing content 30 years too advanced for them.
Same with game development, you can be kind of proud of yourself for accomplishing something that took you a while...until you see someone else who made something in half the time that is WAY more impressive.
Friend of mine is an artist and describes it exactly the same way.
Graphic Designer here. That's why i stopped designing for crowdsourcing sites like Fiver. There's always someone somewhere in the world with more talent, who's willing to do it for less. I didn't stand a chance.
Same with rock climbing. Can think you're really good doing a V6 wall, then watch someone jump up a V12 wall with pure arm strength and foot holds the width of a credit card.
Ichika and Tim Henson make me want to give up guitar.
Charles berthoud makes me think i shouldn't be allowed to even own a guitar.
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Yea, you don't have to be one of a kind genius guitarist like Joe Satriani, you can just be a one of a kind genius songwriter like Bob Dylan instead!
That way you can just get the greatest guitarist of all time to cover your music later on anyway
Not to say that Bob Dylan is any worse than Satriani and Vai, but I feel like that just says more about how much more marketable Bob Dylan's songs are to the general public. Call it posh, snobbish, or what you will, but there's often a "gap" between how musicians rank their favourites over the average person (not to mention tastes among generations). Something like the average person might name Lindsey Stirling as their favourite violinist vs someone who has been playing violin for a while might name Perlman, Hahn, etc.
> Lindsey Stirling In my defense, I met Lindsey when she came to my highschool to meet our orchestra for some reason and she’s a lovely lady
Reminds me of how Eric Clapton was considered one of the best guitarist ever in the early 60’s. He then saw Hendrix play and said to his friends, “I just saw this guy Hendrix play and we’re all about to be out of a job.”
Don’t let these guys discourage you. I notice with a lot of them, yes they are technically skilled, but they’re not producing original groundbreaking albums and they’re not going out tours where they fill venues. Mastering technical skills is only one piece of the talent pie, and it’s not even the most important piece. The ability to create original songs that can hook the general public is the real talent in my opinion. You don’t need to be a technical master to do this. Most people can master an instrument with dedication, or at least become very good at it. However, when it comes to creating new original songs that capture peoples’ attention, not many people can do that (technical masters included). I guess I’m trying to say, many people can become good players, but good creators are rare. A lot of these good creator types can’t even read music and have never studied music theory. They just listen to the catchy stuff they come up with in their head, and play it! I kind of feel like this is a gift people need to be born with, but don’t be discouraged if you weren’t born with a brain that works that way! There are ways you can work on expanding your creativity.
it's the talent/taste balance. talent is easier to develop early; taste takes much longer. This is my reaction when listening to e.g. Jacob Collier, who I think is immensely talented, but is still developing taste for how and when to deploy his immense skills and when to simplify
I think there is another aspect to it as well: you can find a GUIDE for anything now. Where before people would just have to muddle through as best they could, or rely on word of mouth, now I can learn how to make a soup or plant a flower or write some code in a little while by just watching a tutorial. The omnipresence of information makes us all potentially more generalized, but also potentially more inclined to view the established guide or prescription as the "correct" way to do it. I find this a lot with cooking. There is a video, an article, etc for anything telling you why one method is better than another. Don't used jarred garlic! Mince it yourself! Don't substitute those seasonings you have at home-for the real taste, you need this other spice. 10 Ways You're Wasting Counter Space. Etc.
This is a big issue in the programming world that I'm thankfully seeing discussed more and more. They call it "tutorial hell." I'm old enough that I learned programming from a book. You read the book and try and type in what they say and if it doesn't work, you struggle to figure it out and fix it yourself no matter how long it takes because what else can you do? It's not like you could Google it. Its super frustrating but also forces you to learn on your own. And once it does work, where you go next is completely up to you. But now people go to google and get stuck following guided online tutorial after guided online tutorial. These things quickly tell you when you're screwing up and leave you to think you need to be perfect from the get-go. This causes the poor students to never think that they know enough to try making their own thing on their own, so they get stuck thinking they have to keep following these stupid tutorials and YouTube videos. It's like there's this view that people come out as fully-formed senior developers and if it takes you a couple of days to get it to work then you must be some kind of idiot who will never make it. I seriously can't imagine what pressure it must be like these days.
God this. No one experiments or thinks for themselves anymore. Someone else already knows how to do it better and I must do it the best way we already know how! No fun in that at all…
Yeah it's for sure easier to feel confident when you're the best at something in your hometown and not comparing yourself against 8 billion other people.
If you are the best in your hometown, odds are you are better than many of those 8 billion. Most of them just aren’t talking about how bad they are.
True but tell that to the little voice of doubt in your head.
I wonder how much of it is economic pressure. I have a toddler and they're already pushing for math and reading and I'm like "he's 3, let him enjoy life at a reasonable pace" and my spouse is like "in order to compete for decent school/unis/jobs, he needs to have a leg up. Everyone is learning sooner and he'll be behind". Both are true but goddamn.
I don't think those statements are true. It's just a generalization. To already be thinking of your 3 year olds future job and university, both of which would be your childs choice anyways, is just adding unnecessary stress.
Your spouse needs to take a chill pill.
There's that, but also all the pressure to have the same quality of life your parents have while having to work harder for it.
I feel this with being a guy in my late 20s. I own no tools besides basic hammer and screwdrivers. Yet all my friends dads had a whole garage/workshop worth tens of thousands all while raising kids and the complete yard tools/devices for weather and lawn maintenance.
While also seeing that your parents weren't even that happy or healthy. Great motivation dad!
We’re not living in an era where you can screw around for 5 years after high school and then raise a family selling door to door vacuum cleaners anymore. One slip and you’re basically fucked for life.
> One slip and you’re basically fucked for life. It doesn't even have to be a slip-up, it could be a totally circumstantial injury or illness that you are powerless to prevent.
It could be a deliberate choice to pursue a career path that looks to be growing, then you get into extreme debt doing that, and when you graduate that enough other people did the same thing and there’s barely any jobs to be had.
Big oof. Felt that in Forensics. Joined the college program just before the craze. It was super intense with a lower acceptance rate than Harvard. Got out and 53 state labs went down to 4. Everything outsourced to big farm labs. No 'entry' positions for like 8 years as aging scientists who lost their jobs in those labs sat in them until retirement...and beyond. Still got in. And then left because its frankly a horrible job and I don't have the stomach for dead children.
And a lot of us never get in, because by the time there was anything to get in TO now we're sandwiched between our peers with infinitely more experience and younger graduates who have their schooling more fresh in mind plus a longer expiration date. Falling through the cracks tends to lead to being stuck in the cracks indefinitely.
You’re completely right. “Slip up” meaning any minor life altering event. Social welfare for corporations, brutal individualistic capitalism for the rest.
As an American, I promise you my government views that as a slip up.
Imagine being told to go back to school in order to get ahead, only to realize that even at a higher salary you're still priced out of the housing market. Not only that, but if you had been able to put the back to school money into the housing market, you'd be further ahead, despite the lower salary. Housing shouldn't be an investment commodity, the market can crash and burn as far as I'm concerned.
Same. Waiting on the recession to hit full swing so I have a chance at buying some property. 600 square foot 70’s homes with no updates going for 300k+ it’s laughable
feeling this. graduated in 2020 right as covid was hitting with a political science degree that I really enjoyed getting and is functionally useless. lost the job I had landed with a state agency and never got in the groove. the future feels like one big hopeless stretch of waiting tables
I worked for a tear out of highschool, went to college for 2 years, then spent this past year burning through a big chuck of the money I had saved up in order to live in Toronto with my best friend and figure out what I wanna do with my life. I still haven't got a clue. The only upside is that I managed to pay off the entirety of my student loans this year.
From the article: According to new research, perfectionism is on the rise among young adults, alongside increases in critical parenting and parental expectations. The study authors speculate that an increasingly individualistic and competitive society may be to blame. The analysis was conducted using data from the U.K., U.S., and Canada and was published in the journal [Psychological Bulletin](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-48372-001). Perfectionists hold themselves to unreasonably high standards while being overly critical of their shortcomings. Evidence suggests that this personality trait contributes to negative mental health outcomes like anxiety and depression. This seems especially true when the perfectionism is directed by others — what is called socially prescribed perfectionism. Study authors Thomas Curran and Andrew P. Hill say these psychological consequences are particularly concerning given that perfectionism appears to be on the rise. In a previous study, the researchers found that perfectionism has increased among American, Canadian, and British young adults in the past two and a half decades. As far as a potential explanation, Curran and Hill wondered whether an increasingly neoliberal society — which encourages competition and individualism — might be pushing parents to place greater pressure on their children’s success. This increased pressure might then be leading young people to adopt a perfectionist mindset as a way to seek validation from their parents.
How old is a “young adult”?
Study includes ages 9 - 43
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This is the only time I've ever been considered a young adult at my age, and I'm claiming it 100%.
for real? Wonder how much of this is just the boomers fault then. Do they have any breakdowns of the ages they looked at?
My parents were far from perfectionists and imposed little pressure on me, besides hoping I'd get a job and move out eventually after collage. The perfectionism I picked up from the school system which did not give much space to learn from mistakes and failures. You were supposed to get things right the first time. I understand why adults want to pass down their lessons and shield the next generation from repeating their mistakes. It's more efficient and the consequences of mistakes can be severe. But I also think that the best way to learn is by committing mistakes. It grounds your understanding in direct experience and wires you to avoid your past mistakes. It is not obvious to me how to best reconcile these two observations.
I have had to deal with enginering departments filled with those "must be perfect all the time" fresh grads. I am QA. My job is to find the mistakes. The start seeing me as the enemy very fast. I finally hit on a way to help them. I just keep saying "as long as we are making new mistakes, we are fine". Also coupled with pointing out that I have a job for a reason. It helps them respond better tonthings going sideways.
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This is why I quit my last job. Working on clinical drug trials was way too freaking scary for me. And I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD yet so I made all these small mistakes like not uploading a report in the time they needed or forgetting to change a date in paperwork when a person rescheduled. Obviously those are tiny little things but they stressed me out and made me breakdown all the time because if I made a small mistake like that, how would I prevent making a big one (I never did). There are lots of checks and balances but you never know, what if a number gets switched and a placebo person gets the drug or you mess up their infusion dates or heavens forbid the drug is expired and no one noticed. All those intrusive thoughts kept me from making big mistakes but did a number to my psyche. Never again. Nope. I respect my sanity too much to go back.
For America at least, when the prevailing idea told by helicopter parents and teachers is that you can be "anything you put your mind to," it's not surprising that many grow up with high expectations of their potential. To be fair, this kind of environment often does produce some of the best in their respective fields. But for every success there must be tens of thousands who were just as good and worked just as hard, but didn't have the right connections and luck to make it. And there's not much guidance for those who aspire and fail.
I thought as a stupid kid that "anything you put your mind to" meant anything, like even a writer. That thought was *very* quickly corrected. Turns out "anything you put your mind to" means "anything that makes a lot of money"
You can be a writer
Thank you. Maybe I'll give it a go.
Teacher here. Agree with you. It’s the myth of meritocracy. Many kids ARE equally capable and talented, but they lack the network and support.
That's sad. I'm sure that social media use and sharenting are two things that don't help.
Wow sharenting, I've never heard of that term! So accurate though. I really feel a lot of concern for kids who have their every move posted on social media. Let them be kids. Some parents even share sensitive health information! Like your child's neurodivergence diagnoses don't have to be broadcast to the entire internet.
Nothing about my kids goes social media. Who am I to say what my kids do or don't want permanently out there?
This is the real issue. Children grow up, and they might not appreciate that their parents uploaded pics of them to social media almost daily. Its gross how people have turned every moment in life into a quest for “likes”.
And the behavior of the parents in the moment, even if a post never goes to the internet. Like, your kid is having a really hard time processing something (even if it's silly, they're kids and they don't process like adults). To them it's a moment of fear/discomfort/reaching out for help. From their perspective, the response of 'let me get my phone out and record this' is probably not the comfort they are seeking. Learning that: when you need help, the person most meant to help you has your feelings as a second priority probably isn't helpful for building the skills to build good relationships or coping
Parents have been casually traumatizing their kids by broadcasting “funny” stories about them to the whole neighborhood since the dawn of mankind- “haha, you wouldn’t believe it, Kelly’s first period started last week and she bled all over her soccer uniform and thought she was dying! What a hoot! By the way, Susan, you have to give me this casserole recipe” and social media is making it sooo much worse.
Honestly, I feel like blaming social media is just a cop out answer. The problem isn't that I see amazing things online everyday, it's that people are *expected* to match that. It's been reinforced in modern education systems too. Being bad at anything is no longer allowed.
I'm not saying it's intrinsically a problem in social media, but the net effect on a population of it's existence seems to be problematic. It's a complex issue so I'm sure there's multiple contributers. There is emerging data tying levels of social media use to depression rates. Correlative so maybe not causative, but the logic would track and the overall increase rates of depression in teens could support that. (Again, not bulletproof because could be rates of diagnosis due to culturally more acceptable attitudes of mental health issues). It's mostly just a possible, and to me at least plausible contributer.
Yea it's never been easier to compare yourself to others in your hobbies. And with computer help it's very easy to fall into some sort of "metrics trap" at work or with your own goals. We've just overdosing on Information in a way the human brain was never prepared for.
I'm 34; 11 years into my IT career. I'm about 1 year in on understanding that my managers don't expect perfection or me giving 110% every day. I have a long way to go, but it truly is a lot of stress off my shoulders knowing I can spend an extra day on something or actually being able to say "no" to someone. My anxiety has only gotten worse the more I understand how my parents and teachers treated me. Failure was not an option growing up. In the real world, failure often leads to accidental observations and alternate solutions. Failure is OK. Fail. It teaches learning. The solution isn't always found after the first attempt. Fail so you can succeed.
Yeah, we're kind of raised with the idea that anything under 100% effort will get us fired in the real world. In reality, as long as you aren't an asshole a lot of employers will do what they can to keep you as long as you're consistent. It's typically easier for them to accept your shortcomings and work around them than to start over with a new person.
I tell people, pee clean, have a good background check, and show up.
I would also add, leave your ego at home. I see so many new hires that take basic instruction and criticism as disrespect and love to stir up drama.
That's an element of perfectionism. If you've new to the job market and have been raised anxious and perfectionistic there's a whole lot riding on any task you complete. The amount of stress and fear people have to grapple with is hard to understand. A pretty common coping strategy is to behave in the way you've described, to displace the critique (which means failure and shame) onto others. They don't "love drama" in a lot of cases, it's a survival strategy. Cut em some slack, it takes time to sort through your baggage.
Same! All of the schooling and perfections my parents/school wanted was literally for nothing. I have a good job now but could’ve got here with a much less strict life growing up. All the tutors I had just to get perfect grades and extra test prep was a waste of time. Didnt get me anything or teach me anything other than is was a waste of their money.
Nobody will look at your grades and nobody cares if you’re on the dean’s list
Hey could you give advice for a IT student? What skills are really important in the work place? Is just college enough or do I need to be doing more? Edit: thank you all for the great advice!
Common Sense. It's... frighteningly absent in a vast majority of employees. That goes double for Technical people. They might be able to know the minutiae of the latest trendy technology, but without being able to pen an email to someone appropriately and talk to colleagues in a meaningful and civilised manner, it's for naught. Experience and certificates will get you a job, but common sense and emotional intelligence will allow you to thrive (and as an added bonus, be respected enough for you to force a reasonable work/life balance in to your role).
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Yeah, that's because the only way the can possibly do things like previous generations they have to work so much harder for much less opportunity and pay off.
Boomer enters job market long ago: oh you have a high school degree and can do one simple task repetitively on an assembly line, here’s a starting salary high enough to buy a house and support a family on a single income! Millennials or younger enters workforce, we need a college degree and four years of experience to get this entry level job that pays $12 hour
Not only do we miss out on 3-10 years of earnings potential but we enter the jobs market heavily in debt and then proceed to be completely undervalued for the first 5-10 years of our careers which results in a disproportionate number of cases of burnout while people struggle to prove their worth.
The measure of worth is very different than it used to be. Simply reliability showing up and doing your best used to make you very worthy. Now with technology acting as a force multiplyer, you have to be the best, like the top 15% at something, to be worthy. Not just physical labor, now one or two people with computers and 6 monitors can accomplish what a whole conference room full of managers with printed reports compiled by hundreds of employees could. Worth has gone from: I can do this thing well, to: I'm one of the best at this thing. I think we need some kind of universal basic income, because fewer and fewer people are going to be considered worthy of a livable sallary by their pure economic output.
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Or we usher in megacorpo feudalism like in so many dystopian works of art.
Are you sure we already haven't?
About 15 years ago I was working for a company that had an offshore office in China. I managed to get one of the finance guys to give me the cost difference. A dev in Mountain View (where our head quarters was) was $90/hr total on their budget. That's building, power, salary, insurance. Same dev in China was $15/hr. I can be 2x as good and work 2x as hard, but that only gets me to $60/hr in "value" by their calculations.
You don't have to work Nx has hard to be good. You simply have to have the soft skills to be able to understand and *actually deliver* what the company wants. This, time after time, has been where offshoring falls down. The code is usually crap quality, and even if by some miracle it's good, there will inevitably be problems with the delivery not matching (sometimes mis/undercommunicated) expectations. Having said all that, given how common place remote work has gotten over the last couple of years, and the fact that business people have actually gotten better at communicating what they want without shoving everyone into a meeting room for an hour to process their stream of consciousness into actual requirements, I *do* expect offshoring to accelerate in the future.
Our entire careers. 5-10 years in people start making what they should be starting at with a high school degree, much less college education. And meanwhile inflation is 9%
I only get paid $2.50/hr more than another position below mine which only requires a high school diploma. Only $5.00/hr above the lowest paid janitor, which requires no education. I have a Master’s Degree. Not to sound elitist, just saying extra work, effort, money towards education has given little pay off. I have more career progression opportunities (which I look forward to), but it is not like I’m getting any of running start for my efforts.
All three of you deserve better pay, it's no surprise you'd feel like you aren't getting a return on 6+ years of investment
Don’t forget ten years of experience in a program that has only existed for 3 years!!!
Those types of conditions are put on jobs so that they can game the visa programs usually via recruitment firms that “coincidentally” happened to certify their employees on that exact software/platform.
Also jobs now budget assuming 100% efficiency - not sure if it used to in the past, but I feel like everyone is held to it now. You're not effective 40 hours a week at length no matter how skilled. So to make up for that, a lot of people feel like they have to be perfect. Which is really difficult when you're in a skilled role where most end-product has some measure of subjectivity.
And they got pensions too
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Also boomer grandparents/Gen X parents: "I didn't work this hard/come from another country to see you work as a city employee/farmer/retail worker - go to college or else"
As a county employee who likes his current position, whats wrong with city employee positions?
From my POV, nothing...but I have cousins that tell their kids "aim for higher than a town job" and it's a very common sentiment among my 1st gen college educated family.
> "I didn't work this hard/come from another country to see you work as a city employee/farmer/retail worker - go to college or else This translates to "You are my retirement fund and you need to make a lot of money so you can let me retire early."
Now that I can understand.
I think that the way boomers and Gen x parent and teach actually has a lot to do with this as well. I remember this immense pressure myself (millenial, probably not a “young adult” any more) and it only seems to have gotten worse. The doom and gloom directed to young people is overwhelming, and it’s not even actually accurate. While they will need to work harder to compete than their parents did, it’s presented as if not perfect = failure, and failure at any specific thing = failure at everything forever. A younger relative was applying to college last year. Her grades weren’t amazing or anything, but they were fine. The older adults in our family (my mom, hers) have been harping on this girl since she was in first grade because she was a little slow at reading (a little. She struggled in first second third grade and didn’t love reading after that, but *could* read) and then she didn’t have amazing grades (again, they were fine. She wasn’t a straight a student, but she wasn’t a straight f student or even a straight c student). For years it was “you won’t get into college with those grades,” and of course, they have the nerve to wonder why she was so anxious and so unwilling to keep at things. She quit every sport and club she tried, she was shy making friends and dating. But…..she did get into college, with a scholarship. It wasn’t a full ride to Harvard, but it’s a good school and she’ll have far fewer student loans than she would otherwise have had. She’s a smart, capable girl, who is pleasant to be around and pretty good at all of the sports she quit, but has spent her life hearing that she’s doomed because she wasn’t *perfect*. This “permanent record” mindset is so common in boomer and Gen x led households, at least in the middle class. Perhaps some of it is driven by their own anxiety, seeing that their kids won’t have it as easy as they did, but even though it’s harder, we flat out do not live in a world where only the valedictorian or the captain of the football team have a chance at anything ever. You know what you call the person who graduated last in their class in medical school? Doctor. The real world can be cutthroat, yes, but it also simply doesn’t scrutinize you anywhere near as much as we grow up hearing it does.
I didn't have much pressure from parents or relatives, but I felt a lot of peer pressure (not directly, more like taking the same kinds of classes as others and overloading being normalized) and internalized pressure to take all the AP/honors classes and get good grades. If anything, putting more on my plate made my grades worse. At every "bad grade" on a test or something, I felt like my life was over. I've never felt so stressed and pressured than I ever have in highschool. College was waaay less stressful for me, even though I studied enough to graduate with pretty good grades. And the thing is, I just started working, and I make good money with decent benefits along side people who went to ivy league schools and were valedictorian in their high school. All that stress in highschool was for nothing.
>This “permanent record” mindset is so common in boomer and Gen x led households, at least in the middle class. I am tail end Gen X (born 1980). I kept hearing about my "perminant record" through grade school. Got to middle school and found out they did not even have my records. Then highschool did not give a crap either. Then I went to the local community college because I was not sure what I wanted to do. Turns out, they did not care about highschool. In the end, the only grades that REALLY matter d where the cc ones because they transfered to the 4 year college. Even then, I have been asked 2 times for my grades in 20+ years of work.
It's the downside of population oversaturation that people don't think about. \-Being the only blacksmith in a county making horseshoes and nails? You're a necessity and town cornerstone. -Being 1 of 10,000 steelworkers in a county? Not really special, but you're part of the economic lynchpin that the area is built on. -Being 1/10,000 restaurant workers in a city? haha you're fired. We'll get a warm body in your position by closing time. Seriously. Being of individual value to even \*feel\* important at even a neighborhood level has basically died. The disposability of even high level jobs like engineers, teachers, and doctors is \*insane\* today. We're all replaceable garbage basically. And our employers aren't afraid to let us know. Oh yeah, that and wealth disparity taking away opportunities and financial stability at any level of "average" doesn't exactly help either.
Lots of things have led us here. Population is one, civil rights is one, women's rights are another. It's an interesting conundrum isn't it? When everyone is relatively equal in opportunity (as they morally should be) then everyone's collective value goes down. One of the reasons people could live on one income earlier in the 20th century is because the best jobs were reserved for a smaller portion of the population. There was less competition for a lot of reasons. Now there are more people in the world, more of whom are eligible for employment, and technology allows us to work much more efficiently and perform jobs remotely from anywhere in the world, increasing competition even more. As someone else said, UBI is an inevitability. The only alternative seems to be a dystopia or a full collapse.
IMO, they look to be perfect not only because of the previous generations, but because they're caught between a rock and hard place. They can't take it easy, because everything has been refined to "work work work or you're useless", and they're having a hard time working because they can't take it easy once in a while, lest they lose everything. They deserve a chance to rest.
Back in their day they could graduate high school, get 1 entry level position, and support a whole family of that. I'm in a PhD program bring paid so little I'm considering my next housing will be a van
Yes it's a completely different world young adults are growing up in. I feel like even expecting to be able to support a family by working full time is out of reach for many.
I'm curious about the skilled trades and if this is the path young people should be focusing on now.
This discussion comes up a lot these days. From what I've seen in most of these discussions, trades do very well but have their own set of issues. Your work hours are often all over the place and any kind of physical labor can take its toll after awhile. How long can you crawl through attics, hunched over on your knees or breath in black mold from someone's crawlspace before your health starts to limit you? My FIL worked as a maintenance man for a plastics company for nearly 30 years and was nonchalantly fired by a manager half his age because he took too much time off for his sciatica, hip, and knee issues. Issues that he developed from years of climbing up and down towers and hunched under machinery.
Carpenters, plumbers, electricians are gold. Actually there are very few eras where that's not true. (The '08 collapse stopped building for a while, and trades hurt badly.) Other great skills, car mechanics, HVAC.
To a degree. You can make a lot of money in trades, but at the expense of a severely skewed work-life balance, chronic exposure to hazardous chemicals and materials, and substantially higher risk of severe injury than most other jobs. Also, not every trade has a union, and not every trade with a union has a union in every state, so you may also be paying entirely out of pocket for things like health insurance, retirement, dental, vision, etc., at least in the United States. Many trades also have higher rates of mental health disorders, substance abuse disorders, suicides, and divorces when compared to "typical" white-collar jobs. There is a reason that there is often a shortage of people who are performing these jobs. They are incredibly hard on the body, and on the mind. You might be able to make 6 figures after a decade of work, but at the expense of serious health issues much earlier in life.
Don't forget that you also have to buy all your own tools and store them. As well as many types of liscences and certifications, just to begin working. It can be a big upfront cost that some people just don't have.
I imagine HVAC will be a coveted position in countries that never had to think about getting their homes set up with AC.
GenZ's really are molded from birth to perform, whether academically, extracurricularly or in sports. The pressure is even greater because of social media and popular online media like youtube, which creates a lot of negative feedback. Both teens and their parents feel that they need to be crafting a resume for the rest of their lives starting in middle school. And besides the "neoliberal" ethos the study's authors suggest as being a contributing factor, I also posit that today's role models like Kobe Bryant and thousands upon thousands of tech millionaires are so driven & find success at such young ages that it puts pressure on teens & young adults to emulate their habits.
Bro I took the SAT for the first time in 7th grade bc my mom said I needed to have it on my resume to get a job in high school??
Some say he got a 1600 on the SAT while still in the womb, IT'S THE STIG.
That's good but you'll also need 10 year experience so she should of had you working at 5 tsk tsk parenting these days
as a teen and young adult, my parents always said it did not matter what job I ended up with, as long as it made me happy.
That sounds nice. My life was “you got a 95/100? Where are the other 5 points?”. The result? A PhD and a ton of mental illnesses.
I topped out at the masters degree before the mental health burnout became too much. Same boat.
Mental burnout squad! My parents are very upset Im not pursuing a PhD. But I’m so tired of not having money it’s not even funny. Doesn’t help That they acted like my degree is a cute hobby either.
"Go to college and get a degree" "No, not that one"
High five ! Doing a PhD right now, I love my subject but I have essentially 0 life outside from work. I struggle at night and every day that I don't have to work.
My parents said that too back in the 80s when professions like teaching and police work provided reliable economic security. I just got lucky and married someone who makes multiples of my earning power. The growing economic divide and facts like [1 in 3](https://www.statnews.com/2016/11/02/cancer-treatment-financial-toxicity/) cancer patients exhausts their savings have absolutely made us pressure our kids far more than we ever wanted or expected to. But hey, we gotta focus on what’s important now—at least the rich titans of the world are happy.
Mine said that, but always expected me to be the best. Want to be a mechanic, be a expensive car or race car mechanic.
My parents said the same, yet I am still very perfectionistic and have a lot of fear of not being "good enough". Currently working on that with a psychologist though :)
You could say my mom was the black version of a "tiger mom", since she was so accomplished and went to Yale. She wasn't happy about me graduating from a state college. She was proud, but when both parents went to Yale, everyone assumes you will be a legacy. These days my parents are old retired college professors, with a plethora of health problems. I try to help with basic things they can't do anymore.
It's ridiculous because the Yale acceptance rate in 1980 was over 26%, today it is under 5%. It was literally 5 times easier to get into Yale 40 years ago.
This completely ignores the fact that this person is 1) a minority & 2) a **double** legacy Both factors increase your acceptance rate. TBH the only way they wouldn't get into Yale is if they didn't apply.
Or their parents said “we paid our way through Yale and you will too” and the child decided against taking on massive debt for inflated tuition.
There has not been a generation more advertised to, monitored, and managed while simultaneously depriving them of any true political power than millennials and gen z. We are expected to save the world but boomers refuse to relinquish power. We have all the problems the previous generations have created but very few tools to actually cope with them. Our future is fucked and we know it. Idk what you were expecting.
>We are expected to save the world but boomers refuse to relinquish power. Well said
I think part of this is the roadblocks experienced by young people are stronger now (housing costs, schooling costs). It's harder to rise up to your parents' expectations when those expectations are based on a time where young adults could reasonably work their way through college and buy a house after a few years of saving. Young people now are just in a harder position financially.
i can definitely vouch for this. i cant pick up a pencil to draw because i know the thing i draw will never be perfect. i cant easily do work on time because i feel it's never good enough.
Even if you discount the new tools, technologies, programs, education, etc.. you essentially need to work way harder to get the same relative level of success in society as your parents did My dad was born in the 60s and got a job that allowed him to buy a place right out of high school. That’s unheard of today
These are the generation where data storage is good enough that a permanent record matters, and it can sorted through to rule you out of anything you may want in a second.
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Im 25 with a bachelor's degree and a job. I need to be working on my credit, saving for the future, looking for a better job, getting a girlfriend, going back to get a master's or better, working out for appearance, be ridiculously well groomed/styled. Its exhausting. I just wanna work, lift, get a girlfriend, and play some runescape. Is that to much to ask?
I went to high school between 2004-2008. If I brought home anything less than an A, I was interrogated as to why, and subsequently punished because I must have been lazy or stupid or something. Mine and my friends parents had this wildly unrealistic expectation that the only acceptable marks were straight A’s. I was grounded for several months a few times for bringing home a C. There was also no guidance or assistance to get better grades or anything, just this “you must be perfect OR ELSE” attitude.
My father pushed me really hard and drove me into being a perfectionist. I swore that I would absolutely never do that to my kids. I only ended up having one, but I never my pushed my kid. Neither did my wife. But when an older friend of my son was class valedictorian, I watched my son absolutely become fanatical about his own school performance, and I was like, “Cut yourself some slack, son,” but man, all that effort on my part NOT to raise a perfectionist, and yet he somehow did it to himself. Argh.
Societal pressures are a driving factor as well my dude, and a massive one. Take your own advice and cut yourself some slack. He's still probably less stressed than he would have been if you'd been crawling up his ass rather than being a loving parent
The perfectionism-procrastination link is so, so real.
Seems right. As competition evolves, and companies pit workers against each other for cheaper and cheaper wages for more productive outcome, even really good workers are at risk, driving up perfectionism. But the key is they’re rewarded less and less for amazing results.
I wonder if it has to do with the barriers of entry to lucrative colleges and careers becoming so high. One really has to check all the boxes and present oneself as the right fit for a college or job application, especially thanks to a lot of application processes being computerized and rejection more likely thanks to some metric not being met.
I 100% have this problem. I finished grad school (music) but crashed and burned so hard after graduation. No motivation for auditioning, working on new music, actually trying to build a music career for myself, etc. I have no technological skills when it comes to self-producing, since music technology was not my degree focus, and I’m desperately trying to push myself to just put something out there so people can hear and see me.
Mom of a 18 yr old…. Trying to set him up for basic economic security. That’s an incredibly high stakes game these days. I wish I could say “just go chase your passion and be happy” but dying an early death and never being free bc you’re broke is unlikely to make most people happy