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What really is unnerving about this? Ambition, craving financial success, and gasp-horror 'entrepreneurship' may be beneath the kind of people who end up writin

What really is unnerving about this? Ambition, craving financial success, and gasp-horror 'entrepreneurship' may be beneath the kind of people who end up writing staff columns for the New Yorker, but there's nothing inherently wrong with it. Dare I say it, “I have to remind myself that I can’t overdo it, so I’ll do my posts, and then turn off my phone for the night and just be isolated.” might be good advice for the author, who from her Twitter seems to be a fully paid-up member of 'lol trying to adult' Twitter.

SaltyMaia 9y ago
Came to the comments because I thought it was funny finding this on hackernews, where much of the community subscribes to this nonsense ideology. Not surprised to see this comment on top
- dictum 9y ago
  There's no shortage of nonsense ideologies for teenagers to choose.
  - SaltyMaia 9y ago
    That's definitely true, and I think this may be one of the least bad. But when it becomes that the actual "perceived leaders" of the world subscribe to it, the ideology is no longer silly on the macro scale and we all end up trying to scam each other for money in ways that arent _inherently_ wrong, just _practically_ destroying the world.
smacktoward 9y ago
It's unnerving because: 1) It reinforces the idea that for young women, the only way to achieve business success is to be performatively "girly" -- being unceasingly cheerful and social, presenting a breathless aw-shucks ("so amazing!") demeanor, working on things like fashion lines and skin care products or on image-first careers like "Instagram influencer." Society accepts that ambitious young men will present to the world in lots of different ways, but when it comes to ambitious young women we try to hammer them all into the same shape. 2) It puts pressure on its readers, who are in an age bracket we generally associate with childhood, to trade the traditional privileges of childhood -- shielding from the pitiless demands of the market, space to experiment with different facets of their personality, time to dedicate to education and self-development -- for the precarious, rat-race lifestyle that adults live every day. Kids who are saying "there is no such thing as a regular 9 to 5. We work 24/7!" are kids who have internalized the idea that work is all there is, that their lives don't have room for anything else. That would be a sad thing for a fully grown adult to believe, much less a thirteen-year-old.
- kristianc 9y ago
  1) An alternative reading of the magazine is that it is celebrating young creators, who have achieved success through alternative routes (make up lines, t-shirts, YouTube channels) than the standard middle class millennial career path of "being born into the right family, liberal arts education, job at BuzzFeed/Vanity Fair/Teen Vogue/New Yorker while building out performative angst Twitter persona." Following that line, for most people without the right background/connections/ability to take an unpaid internship in New York for three months, results in them becoming on several levels completely unemployable. 2) The readers are self-consciously choosing this media themselves anyway - through the YouTube channels they subscribe to and watch, the Instagram influencers they follow, the products they buy. Instead of mindlessly scrolling through social media feeds, these readers are now being encouraged to think how they can follow in their footsteps. This article imo, reveals much more about the prejudices of the author than the readers or the publishers.
  - smacktoward 9y ago
    > An alternative reading of the magazine is that it is celebrating young creators Who are creative within a narrow, conventionally "girly" band of creative endeavors. Teen Boss would not be interested in a 15-year-old girl who invented a revolutionary new type of automotive engine, because it is not a magazine about girls with grease on their hands. Girls who want to should be free to engage in those kinds of "girly" pursuits, of course. To each their own! But by focusing only on those pursuits, Teen Boss sends the message to girls who are interested in other things (like STEM!) that they're weirdos who are walking away from success instead of towards it in their own way.
    - kristianc 9y ago
      > Who are creative within a narrow, conventionally "girly" band of creative endeavors. Teen Boss would not be interested in a 15-year-old girl who invented a revolutionary new type of automotive engine, because it is not a magazine about girls with grease on their hands. Perhaps not, but then you're being reductive by equating engineering with 'grease on their hands'. There's plenty of STEM careers that don't involve any grease - such as materials science, fashion design, sound engineering, to stuff that this magazine would wholeheartedly endorse, like developing your own make up line. 'I made thousands building a FaceTune competitor' certainly would. For that matter, how many people on Hacker News deal with grease in their day to day work? And is the kind of thing being discussed here that different from 'I made $32k a month recurring revenue' IndieHackers story, the likes of which regularly gets voted to the top of HN?
samlevine 9y ago
> What really is unnerving about this? It reminds the middle-class strivers that "MAKE MONEY FA$T!" isn't that far from themselves, despite all their scrambling efforts.
aje403 9y ago
Ambition and craving financial success are great, teaching kids that the path forwards to that is screaming on the internet and infecting other kids with their uneducated opinions is not great. Regardless, it will happen whether us "not young" folk like it or not. Hopefully some kids will get rich with history and math channels instead of being attractive and making farting noises

SaltyMaia 9y ago

Came to the comments because I thought it was funny finding this on hackernews, where much of the community subscribes to this nonsense ideology. Not surprised to see this comment on top

dictum 9y ago
There's no shortage of nonsense ideologies for teenagers to choose.
- SaltyMaia 9y ago
  That's definitely true, and I think this may be one of the least bad. But when it becomes that the actual "perceived leaders" of the world subscribe to it, the ideology is no longer silly on the macro scale and we all end up trying to scam each other for money in ways that arent _inherently_ wrong, just _practically_ destroying the world.

smacktoward 9y ago

It's unnerving because: 1) It reinforces the idea that for young women, the only way to achieve business success is to be performatively "girly" -- being unceasingly cheerful and social, presenting a breathless aw-shucks ("so amazing!") demeanor, working on things like fashion lines and skin care products or on image-first careers like "Instagram influencer." Society accepts that ambitious young men will present to the world in lots of different ways, but when it comes to ambitious young women we try to hammer them all into the same shape. 2) It puts pressure on its readers, who are in an age bracket we generally associate with childhood, to trade the traditional privileges of childhood -- shielding from the pitiless demands of the market, space to experiment with different facets of their personality, time to dedicate to education and self-development -- for the precarious, rat-race lifestyle that adults live every day. Kids who are saying "there is no such thing as a regular 9 to 5. We work 24/7!" are kids who have internalized the idea that work is all there is, that their lives don't have room for anything else. That would be a sad thing for a fully grown adult to believe, much less a thirteen-year-old.

kristianc 9y ago
1) An alternative reading of the magazine is that it is celebrating young creators, who have achieved success through alternative routes (make up lines, t-shirts, YouTube channels) than the standard middle class millennial career path of "being born into the right family, liberal arts education, job at BuzzFeed/Vanity Fair/Teen Vogue/New Yorker while building out performative angst Twitter persona." Following that line, for most people without the right background/connections/ability to take an unpaid internship in New York for three months, results in them becoming on several levels completely unemployable. 2) The readers are self-consciously choosing this media themselves anyway - through the YouTube channels they subscribe to and watch, the Instagram influencers they follow, the products they buy. Instead of mindlessly scrolling through social media feeds, these readers are now being encouraged to think how they can follow in their footsteps. This article imo, reveals much more about the prejudices of the author than the readers or the publishers.
- smacktoward 9y ago
  > An alternative reading of the magazine is that it is celebrating young creators Who are creative within a narrow, conventionally "girly" band of creative endeavors. Teen Boss would not be interested in a 15-year-old girl who invented a revolutionary new type of automotive engine, because it is not a magazine about girls with grease on their hands. Girls who want to should be free to engage in those kinds of "girly" pursuits, of course. To each their own! But by focusing only on those pursuits, Teen Boss sends the message to girls who are interested in other things (like STEM!) that they're weirdos who are walking away from success instead of towards it in their own way.
  - kristianc 9y ago
    > Who are creative within a narrow, conventionally "girly" band of creative endeavors. Teen Boss would not be interested in a 15-year-old girl who invented a revolutionary new type of automotive engine, because it is not a magazine about girls with grease on their hands. Perhaps not, but then you're being reductive by equating engineering with 'grease on their hands'. There's plenty of STEM careers that don't involve any grease - such as materials science, fashion design, sound engineering, to stuff that this magazine would wholeheartedly endorse, like developing your own make up line. 'I made thousands building a FaceTune competitor' certainly would. For that matter, how many people on Hacker News deal with grease in their day to day work? And is the kind of thing being discussed here that different from 'I made $32k a month recurring revenue' IndieHackers story, the likes of which regularly gets voted to the top of HN?

samlevine 9y ago

> What really is unnerving about this? It reminds the middle-class strivers that "MAKE MONEY FA$T!" isn't that far from themselves, despite all their scrambling efforts.

aje403 9y ago

Ambition and craving financial success are great, teaching kids that the path forwards to that is screaming on the internet and infecting other kids with their uneducated opinions is not great. Regardless, it will happen whether us "not young" folk like it or not. Hopefully some kids will get rich with history and math channels instead of being attractive and making farting noises