My somewhat peculiar life puts me in unusually close contact with a variety of people of different ages and circumstances. And personally, I think that our treatment of young people is probably one of the most destructive things to happen in history.
It combines a refusal to take seriously, honor, and support anything children/ adolescents do as a constructive thing [your hobby is fun, but of course you'll be an office drone someday; aren't you and your boyfriend cute? Of course, he's just a disposable learning experience]...
...with a social insistence on spending fistful's of young people's time and resources on things with massive long-term consequences that, coincidentally, are useful/convenient to the aged vampires that run the world:
"Of course you have to go to school; how else will you be a good Prussian citizen? How will you be socialized? School is so good you should take out a six-figure loan to keep doing it. Don't worry: it'll get you a job to not only service your student loan, but the car lease."
Maybe it's a coincidence that the people I know who avoided this, with homeschooling, ballet lessons, atelier-instead-of-college, are interesting, physically healthy, scrappy, capable of speaking to someone outside their age cohort. Maybe it's all selection bias.
Maybe eighteen year olds are the best people to socialize eighteen year olds. Maybe it's safer to take the hundred-k loan; everyone else is doing it. Maybe if you fail as an artist, it was unrealistic, unsafe dream, but if you get laid off from MegaCorp, well, it's the Economy
Maybe I'm just an odd, lucky person [I am]. And I know that there will always be failed artists, and a need for ditchdiggers & toilet cleaners, and plenty of people who just want to Do Their Task and then Drink.
But I can't help but feel we've built a machine for the creation of Autumn People. It's part of what people are gesturing at with "Ugh, late-stage capitalism", and I'm sympathetic, but personally, I think that's an obfuscation/ misdirection the machine uses to defend itself.
I wish I had a solution, a government policy or charitable group I believed in; I wish I knew the way to Mordor. I do think there must be something, though, that honors and supports the desire young people have to Do Something, instead of just pacifying & exploiting it.
