Mish brings up the subject. I am dating a woman who has a senior in high school. He and his friends just don't care about cars like the prior generations. Nor are they eager to get that first job to earn lots of money. (That is relative. When you've never had a job before and you are 17, $150 per week is a lot of money.)There are two reasons I think: One is the smartphone. They are now connected to each other 24/7 in ways you and I couldn't imagine when we were kids. The other is the massive influx of immigrant workers over the past 20 years. I am not going to debate the legal vs illegal thing, but go into any fast food joint and you won't see high school kids behind the counter, you'll see middle-aged Hispanic people, primarily women. Why would the manager of a burger joint hire a high school kid with angsty teenaged attitude when they can get an adult who truly needs the work and doesn't complain and doesn't take off if they have a hot date?
4 comments:
Good analysis. Kids don't need cars now to see naked people. Their phones and computers now provide for free what we used to have to really work at getting. Sadly, Facebook etc has really replaced a lot of the in person relationships we used to have.
Heck, who needs to have a high school reunion now that we are bombarded daily by pictures of what people we went to high school with had for breakfast, much less what they're doing work and marriage wise.
Forget cars. Within 10 or 15 years, leaving the house will pretty much be rendered obsolete and pointless.
Also... relatively speaking, there are few jobs for kids, and the pay is shitty compared to typical teenager pay of 40 years ago. The vast majority of 17-year-olds have no money for a car (or gas) to begin with, and couldn't afford either even with a part-time job.
Fedgov and the nanny state have made employing 'utes verboten.
I used to bicycle to a resturant were I preped in the kitchen. I was 14 and thought it was great. The cooks were like pirate/bikers. I got to use big sharp knives. In the morning, around 6:30 I'd get there. I had a three mile ride and the town to myself. When I got there the kitchen was warm and smelled of cofee and bacon. I'd have to pull out huge, cross stacked aluminum cooking sheets with near cooked baccon. It was bubbling fat and liquid. I'd put the bacon into trays and pour off the fat. Imagine a kid being allowed to burn himself or cut his finger off? I got to hang around with hard waitresses and go to weekend after work parties and drink.
Later I worked on framing crews, maybe 16-17. I didn't have a car. Roofing, walking walls, open floor joists ten feet over concrete.
Other kids worked in garages, under cars changing hot oil, using impact wrenches, leaning over running motors, hot exhaust.
We all thought it was cool and tough( ish ).
Now the single moms have no male figure to take the boys side, so the boys stay home. Heck, they won't even let the 17 year olds use a lawn mower.
I'd say even I might of been around 12-14 and we were cutting up wood on a table saw to make boats to push out into the river.
I can remember reading histories of Europeans marveling at the skill sets of young Americans.
Funny thing up here in the DC area is seeing 16-year-olds who DO NOT WANT to get a car or even a drivers license! What's with that?
I don't have a kid that age, so I can only go by what my friends tell me, but it seems that the kids would rather be driven to places than do the driving themselves. Seriously.
This is so very different than when I was 16 years old and clamoring for the freedom that a license and my own car would give me.
Oh wait, I didn't mind working at the supermarket where I cleaned out the incinerator and sorted returnable bottles to pay for the crap old car I had. I guess that's one big difference between kids then and kids now.
Post a Comment