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What are the things that motivates them, and what do they themselves want to do in life? I ask this because much of the undertone in the article and in this th

• teawrecks 5y ago
  When I was probably 18 I asked a friend/coworker who was going to community college what they wanted to do after college and they just didn't know. I couldn't wrap my head around that. As far back as I can remember, I always had an answer when an adult asked me "what I want to be when I grow up". It wasn't always a coherent answer, but I always knew what stuff I found interesting. I don't know why it's different for some people, but it is. I have to think it's something we just don't put emphasis on in our education system or by parents. So pop culture does it for us. When I was a kid everyone wanted to be someone famous; a singer, an athlete, an actor, etc. Today is no different, everyone wants to be an influencer, a streamer, etc. I think we need to make it a point for kids to understand from a young age that not everyone can be the famous person, neither should everyone want to be. There are so many other options, they only want fame because they don't know anything else.
  • yibg 5y ago
    I think you might be the odd one out here. I don't have stats for it, but looking at myself and people around me, most didn't really know what they want to do for a career after school. School typically doesn't really prepare you well for figuring out what you want to do, especially secondary and prior.
    • teawrecks 5y ago
      Oh I totally agree, the US education system doesn't put any emphasis on helping kids figure out what they want to do after school. If a kid asks "when am I ever going to use this?", it's a sign you need to back up and lay some more groundwork. I don't know why it was different for me, but looking back I think it was important.
      • gowld 5y ago
        The vast majority of employed people are not doing "what they wanted to do when they grow up", and quite many are doing jobs they didn't even know existed.
        • bluefirebrand 5y ago
          I wanted to be a Ninja Turtle for quite some time when I was growing up, so I really don't know how much emphasis we should be placing on "what do you want to be when you grow up" anyways. In case anyone is wondering, I didn't become a Ninja Turtle.
  • orky56 5y ago
    It's a natural phenomenon. Potential for anything turns into realization that hard work and passion need to also be coupled with capability. It's debilitating in some ways but a coming of age for others. Those who can cross this chasm succeed and pivot accordingly.
  • lordnacho 5y ago
    As an adult, one of the main observations about education is how little it showed me about what jobs are out there. People pick degrees based on the advice of counselors who seem to know of 8 kinds of job, and half of them are not something you can advise a kid in a striving high school to follow (binman, factory worker, etc) . It's actually nuts how people will do an internship and then decide this is the thing they want to do. Or they get a visit from someone at school and now they're gonna be an author. If there's one thing we need in society, it's experiential information about jobs. For instance I've known many people who went into management consulting. None of them think it has any value. If I was a kid I'd want to know that. Accountants come across many types of business and are employable in many types of firms. The job is closer to a lawyer than many people expect, esp irl to tax. Your math degree is minimally useful. Recruiters talk to people all day and are paid in proportion to the salary of the placed person. Anyway those are just jobs that I don't do, and I know a tiny bit about them through contact with real world people. Kids need these contacts.
• lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > What are the things that motivates them, and what do they themselves want to do in life? I suspect quite a few people are looking at the odds of achieving various goals, and simply changing the goals. Such as owning a home in desirable areas, or having kids if you cannot afford a food school district or a job that allows you to be home for dinner. Or if you have experienced income instability, and you do not feel comfortable bringing children into the world. I probably would not have if I did not find a spouse with income in the top two quintiles. Not that there’s nothing wrong with the alternative, but different people have different risk tolerances and higher (perceived) volatility can be a cause for change in some population wide changed we are seeing.
  • magicsmoke 5y ago
    > Or if you have experienced income instability, and you do not feel comfortable bringing children into the world. Yet poorer developing nations have higher birth rates than developed nations. Is it because they have lower expectations for what their children need to live a "good" life, that they just have more hope that things will work out somehow, or that they somehow don't care about these concerns?
    • edoceo 5y ago
      No condoms
      • magicsmoke 5y ago
        We've got it ladies and gentlemen. The secret to halting population decline in the developed world is banning condoms.
        • shkkmo 5y ago
          I don't feel like the effect of contraception on population growth is a secret... The second order effects get a bit complicated though...
• pcbro141 5y ago
  On a related note, on mainstream TV/articles about declining marriage/birthrates in the West, it's common to see criticisms about modern Western men. How women can't find life partners because men aren't masculine enough anymore, don't want to grow up, don't get educated etc. But very rarely do you see any criticism or even questioning about modern Western women and what men want in a woman. Only what women want. The journalists never seem interested in asking whether modern Western women are marriage material? Degrees don't make you marriage material. Are men still attracted to feminine women, and are there enough feminine women? Are there potential reasons why Western men find it risky to commit to Western women? Do Western women have realistic standards? Do Western women need to be less picky about superficial characteristics? Given that the vast majority breakups are initiated by women, could women in a lot of instances be ending relationships and wrecking their own homes over trivial matters? The mainstream coverage of this topic is usually very one sided/gynocentric. Women questioning the value of modern men is acceptable, while men questioning the value of modern women will often get you labeled a misogynist/woman hating incel. This imbalance/lack of discussing what men want in women/lack of criticism of some aspects of modern women really hurts marriage minded women as well, because a lot of women are growing up without hearing what men want in a woman to marry.
  • Mediterraneo10 5y ago
    > Degrees don't make you marriage material. This gets said so much on fora with men who regard themselves as “redpilled”, but it makes no sense to me personally. As a bookish and arts-inclined person, so much of my worldview, the things that occupy my thoughts during the day, has been formed by the canon of literature, music, films. No woman would seem dating and marriage material to me if she weren’t similarly erudite and we would have some common ground in that respect. It has been the number-one factor driving all my relationships over my life. Often the man claiming that men don’t care about a woman’s education, goes on to say that what matters is that the woman knows, for example, how to cook. That, too, has never made sense to me. I live in a country where for the childless, eating out good healthy food is not appreciably more expensive than cooking at home, and a woman who chooses to take advantage of that and use her valuable time for other pursuits, would seem more attractive.
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  The gender role for men in TV the last 35 years has been to be stupid like Homer Simpson. Studies show it worked?
  • aidenn0 5y ago
    "The Simpsons" and "Married With Children" were the only two shows my dad wouldn't let me watch at home for basically that exact reason.
• rasen58 5y ago
  I don't think a lot of people know what motivates them or what they want to do in life. If you could play video games all day and have fun or force yourself to study or work at a hard job all day, what would you choose? Wouldn't most people prefer the easier and fun option? Do you have a solution to this? (I've been thinking about it for a while and I don't know)
  • qq4 5y ago
    I don't think many people are motivated to do much of anything, and so by consequence they prefer the easier, "fun" option of wasting their time. A motivated person doesn't have to force themselves to work hard, it's the default. That's how I see it.
  • belorn 5y ago
    In part the solution I would point to is the same that is often said by parents in how one get well adapted children. Provide social support and introduce hobbies. They are not a silver bullet for everyone, but it catches a significant larger portion than stereotypical gender roles. We can also draw inspiration from the cultural change that we have seen for women. How often do you see in movie a person say to a woman "Are you happy? Is this really what you want...". Lifting personal motivation as an actually question is a early good step towards making people think about it. There seems to also be a possible error in how people perceive the problem. In the absent of video games you would not suddenly get motivation. Even if you would throw them out on the street with no money, food or shelter, the result would not be a sudden aspiration to become what society expect men to be. Finding what motivate oneself can either be done through the help by others, or alone. It not as much of a question about what is easier as all hobbies are more work than no hobby at all.
• dang 5y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27477783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27477783. (Just trying to prune the top-heaviest threads.)
• Siira 5y ago
  I wonder if it's more inherent than just culture. Women are more, for lack of a better word, desirable to men than vice versa. A man can value a woman who does nothing but exist. But a man needs something extra to provide some value to the partnership. (The previous sentences are, obviously, meant as an statistical tendency, not a universal truth.) Thus, while the negative constrains on women were mostly baseless in a modern society (with violence and manual labor being increasingly devalued), the negative expectations on men are not as baseless. Of course, in so far as monogamy and the roughly 50% sex ratio mandate some kind of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease, these cultural expectations will lower over time, but I fear that the tradeoffs of the male sex will continue to become more and more out of touch with what is needed to prosper.