Thanks for that! It'd be interesting to see a comparison to Spain, the other big, fabulously wealthy empire in history that burned itself out in a similar manner.
Really interesting read! It touched on parts of childhood that I hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about before. Looking back, it's clear that over the last few decades there has been a stark growth in the number of "helicopter parents" that put their kids in various after-school activities to try and shape them based on their ideals.
There's also been a lot of discussion on the internet about the loss of "third places" in society and I wonder how that has played a role in accelerating the loss of play in the youth of today.
The more "helicoptery" segments of society seem to be doing better, at least economically, than their more hands-off counterparts. There's a couple of possible explanations for this (including reverse-causation), but it seems at least plausible that there may be a material trade-off here, where the kind of self-denial that makes you miserable is also what gets you ahead. I haven't personally found that that's the case - one of the big personal reasons I founded my company is to take a bet that I can succeed without being anything other than myself, both to prove it to myself and to everyone else - but I could very easily be wrong, especially because I really don't want it to be true.
The increasing competitiveness of careers and the ability to get "locked out" from early missteps seems like another possible causative factor. Setting aside for a moment to what extent it's actually true, it's certainly true that a lot of youth have a strong perception that missteps can screw them over for good separately from the ideas they're getting from parents.
There's less room to do stupid things in high school when your future depends (or at least, depends as far as you're concerned) on a four-year degree from a good school. To get into a good school, you need to rack up those AP credits. Better start in tenth grade, there's not enough hours in the day to get them all. And to get into those classes you'd better do well on that prep PSAT you took in eighth grade, so you should start prepping for it in seventh, and whoops look at the time you'd better start working hard there, hypothetical nine-year-old.
"Third spaces" vanishing is a physical manifestation of a broader phenomenon: the elimination of slack in a world that is optimizing it away in favor of, well, Slack.
Sure. Although most of the tips I'm going to give you are just business tips. Being yourself is easy; being the most successful version of yourself is very hard.
i've always wanted to try to start a company and really strike out on my own, but it's a terrifying prospect.
if i'm honest, the real reason isn't that i want to be my own boss or control my schedule -- it's that I think succeeding as your own business is the only way I could vanquish my persistent imposter syndrome.
It's no less terrifying to do it. But speaking as someone who did pull the trigger: it doesn't vanquish your imposter syndrome, it just makes every downturn feel like proof of it.
Ego's also a very dangerous thing in business. You have to have enough of it to get started, but it's also very easy to refuse to change course or deal with an inconvenient reality when you feel like it's a referendum on you. For me, at least, it helps to remember that "I am a smart person who is doing a really hard thing pretty successfully" and "I will be horribly wrong frequently" are not mutually exclusive statements. There's a good reason I wrote thousands of words about how a lot of very smart people ended up not succeeding; it's probably the most important thing I learned at my last job.
Helicopter parents are more about not giving a child room to explore and make mistakes. They micromanage every activity. Those parents are seriously handicapping their childs brain development.
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