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Just a very friendly ping to @netstack to ask him to take special note of this part from this post:
Our previous conversation discussing it
Huh. I’d forgotten all about that.
I maintain that I’ve never seen a zoomer use that reasoning as an excuse. 20somethings who are trying to prolong their childhood rarely act self-aware. I recognize that both you and @ThisIsSin have seen it happen. No idea what kind of filter bubble could separate us on that.
Well, I know (or rather, knew, they're older now) teenagers, and in particular whose parents tend to be pretty intelligent though on the old side- so they benefit/suffer from the same late-Boomer social/parenting patterns with which I am familiar. This filter bubble was honestly just luck [and to a degree did indeed provide a sort of second teenager-hood; it's uncanny the second time around].
It's partly cultural compression; I don't find circumstances growing up now to be particularly different from that which were present in my time, but that's also because most of the sabotage to the cultural push/rewards of growing up was already done before I got there, so there wasn't much left to take away. (This was mostly something that happened in the '80s, as I understand it.)
It's more just the room temperature and the 'artificially zero expectations during critical period' that does most of the damage resulting in these guys just acting slightly off, like they're invisibly handcuffed to something. "You shouldn't try because you're undeveloped" combined with teenagers being smart or agreeable enough to take that advice seriously is destructive (and can evoke certain Uncle Ruckus-like behaviors with respect to each other too). I think most adults tend to take for granted some in-built biological resistance to that meme because "well, if someone told me that I would have just done it anyway out of spite" but I'm not so sure. It's that kid who clicks "no" to the site banner that asks them if they're 18 yet, where honesty and conscientiousness become vices.
Some of them are even self-aware enough to wonder where the opportunity for them to create the stories their parents always tell is, or when it's going to show up. It's very strange and to be honest quite depressing that [society in general] still suffers from this problem, and I don't know (but think very often, perhaps too much) about how to break it (and trying to identify where to settle, in a place that maximally permits this sort of thing, is one of the things I tell myself delays family formation on my end).
Self-awareness is really rare anyway; those who have it but would rather spend time Motteposting rarer still.
I noticed a good chunk of this effect in my 10s (perhaps I might say I was radicalized from an early age). The distractions that were thrown my way proved effective enough though (plus, even though I underrate this, I got a chance to work in places that are either illegal [now] or highly unusual- I didn't just do nothing, even though it feels like it a lot of the time), but a lot of time I'm recalling things I specifically promised myself at the time I'd remember (and commit to not doing in the future). Emotional states reacting to certain things, etc.
I'm well past 20something at this point, but for a couple of reasons won't clock (to even said aformentioned teenagers) as someone who's doing this. Part of that is that I'm just as meme-poisoned, I guess (I skip a certain piece of modern slang, but I also skipped modern slang back when I was an actual teenager, so...), but I think the bigger part of it is that I actually kind of like teenagers (or the stereotypical attitude they have more generally), and maybe the relative lack of awkwardness does most of the passing (or rather, I'm just as awkward around these guys as I am around everyone else, which is especially apparent whenever I interact with someone younger than that). But, who can say.
But then I never grew up in an area where the average 10-something was particularly stupid/irresponsible (i.e. exceeding expectations), went to what you'd call a charter school, and grew up in the (equivalent of the) Purple part of a Blue state. So the concept that the young are actually more thoughtful [and risk-averse] once out of adult earshot is pretty natural to me (and experience bears that out); whether that's simply caused by the assumption that they wouldn't be, I don't know.
It's also more widespread than that; more generally, I've noticed interactions (just walking around in public) where the kid notices something before the parent does (usually a car, or someone taking a photo), and the kid's already corrected the problem before the adult can tell them to. And I think that some of that's just caused by inherently having experienced them at their worst and most helpless, but I think a lot of it is either just not paying attention, or not having the time/context/energy to know when to pay attention to the fact they're going to automatically do it. Maybe "being told to do something I was already doing" is just uniquely annoying to me, but I don't think it is.
I think some of the problem is that we don't teach people how to lead properly, and now that there's less organic opportunity (both to make mistakes, and the mistakes made are costlier now) the people who did learn it organically are now failing to compensate for the fact you seem to have to intentionally encourage that development now. Because the teenage rebellion meme isn't strong enough and won't help the people who weren't going to do it anyway.
(And the people who don't aren't necessarily doing it on purpose, since there's the power angle to consider, and the biology angle, and the cost angle, and the "they're turning into someone you hate" angle, and the "I spent 13 years raising this kid why aren't my old strategies working please help me" angle... tend to frustrate the powers of observation -> ability to compensate for this in people I believe have those powers.)
It's kind of the definition of a wicked problem.
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