Since Dr. Carstensen's opinion seems to be landing on the wrong side of the HN consensus, let me play the devil's advocate. > “We need a new model,” Carstensen

Since Dr. Carstensen's opinion seems to be landing on the wrong side of the HN consensus, let me play the devil's advocate. > “We need a new model,” Carstensen says of the current norms around career pacing. The current one “doesn’t work, because it fails to recognize all the other demands on our time. People are working full-time at the same time they’re raising children. You never get a break. You never get to step out. You never get to refresh. . . .We go at this unsustainable pace, and then pull the plug.” I believe this explanation is intended to sell the idea, but I don't believe this should be the motivation for driving towards a different model. Rather, I'd suggest the motivation to be to enable "productive unemployment" as automation continues to spread. Hear me out. If there's a consistent and unwavering societal expectation to enter the workplace full time between the ages of 19-22, there'll also be a persistent risk of political upheaval when employment numbers stagnate or falter and when people feel as if they're not achieving what's expected of them (or generally when they're unable to eat), a scenario which will continue to play out and perhaps even become endemic as automation and various branches of AI capture more and more unskilled and skilled labor categories, respectively. Shifting labor expectations allows for a more potentially graceful transition over the course of a few generations to a model where people can choose which direction to take their lives, either studying something in depth before diving into a niche that still needs human talent or focusing on exploring their own personal passions as the world around them continues to operate mostly automatically. It's a very Gene Rodenberry-esque position to take, and it's perhaps ludicrously optimistic, but a model like what Dr. Carstensen is pitching might make sense in facilitating a gradual transition to a more automated world. This is the very basic kernel of an idea, and I expect what I've just voiced is crude enough to be utterly dismantled on deeper analysis, but I voice it to get minds thinking moreso than to say "Laura's right and you guys are all wrong"-- nah. It's just a passing thought.