(no subject)

[moominmolly]

From the NurtureShock article Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today:

Here’s a Twilight Zone-type premise for you. What if surgeons never got to work on humans, they were instead just endlessly in training, cutting up cadavers? What if the same went for all adults – we only got to practice at simulated versions of our jobs? Lawyers only got to argue mock cases, for years and years. Plumbers only got to fix fake leaks in classrooms. Teachers only got to teach to videocameras, endlessly rehearsing for some far off future. Book writers like me never saw our work put out to the public – our novels sat in drawers. Scientists never got to do original experiments; they only got to recreate scientific experiments of yesteryear. And so on.

Rather quickly, all meaning would vanish from our work. Even if we enjoyed the activity of our job, intrinsically, it would rapidly lose depth and relevance. It’d lose purpose. We’d become bored, lethargic, and disengaged.

In other words, we’d turn into teenagers.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Comments

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

if he's just speculating with no evidence whatsoever, as he seems to be, then I for one am prepared to fervently disbelieve.

Yeah, and that would be pretty simple to test: find a society where people take on "real life" responsibilities in their teens -- or hell, just round up a bunch of teenage runaways, who've had to deal with life hard and fast, like the "good old days" -- and see what their brains are like. I mean, besides tasty. But all brains are tasty, so that's not really a way to distinguish them.