Or there's less success to go around so people have to start competing for it at younger ages.
Compare the possible career and life paths of a middle of the road person born in the US in 1930 vs 1960 vs 1990.
An average non high achiever had much better prospects in 1930 than 1960 and better prospects in 1960 than 1990.
If born in 1930 you could get a high school diploma and then buy a house and raise a family on your factory worker salary. You could just go through life with no strategic planning and do well enough and live comfortably.
Someone born in 1960 would do well to get a degree and a white collar job if they want that life. Strategic planning is nice but not necessary, you can probably do ok without it.
Someone born in 1990 needs to have a 4yr degree in something lucrative (STEM) and even then buying a house and starting a family is not a given. To succeed you need to have figured out your strategic plan by about age 15 and then execute on it in order to have the same life that someone born in 1930 could just happen into without much thought.
> Someone born in 1990 needs to have a 4yr degree in something lucrative (STEM) and even then buying a house and starting a family is not a given. To succeed you need to have figured out your strategic plan by about age 15 and then execute on it in order to have the same life that someone born in 1930 could just happen into without much thought.
This is not remotely true, but I grant that it's the currently popular narrative.
Yes, and it's the fact that it's the popular narrative that drives this anxiety and ends up being a sell fulfillkng prophecy. Everyone says this is the case and then a kid gets filled with anxiety when they think about doing something else and boom, there you have it, stress addled and burned out at the age of 25.
I have STEM degrees, but barely any strategy, and have done alright for myself and my family. My childhood was homeschool until high school, and pretty free range. Did zero extra curricular activities except ROTC in college, which got me my first job right out of college in the Air Force.
It seems like there are plenty of non STEM blue collar jobs that afford a nice life, but the problem is they are looked down on.
I think part of the problem is that everyone is optimizing for the same niche, which makes that niche very crowded and requires extreme amounts of optimization to succeed.
Compare the possible career and life paths of a middle of the road person born in the US in 1930 vs 1960 vs 1990.
An average non high achiever had much better prospects in 1930 than 1960 and better prospects in 1960 than 1990.
If born in 1930 you could get a high school diploma and then buy a house and raise a family on your factory worker salary. You could just go through life with no strategic planning and do well enough and live comfortably.
Someone born in 1960 would do well to get a degree and a white collar job if they want that life. Strategic planning is nice but not necessary, you can probably do ok without it.
Someone born in 1990 needs to have a 4yr degree in something lucrative (STEM) and even then buying a house and starting a family is not a given. To succeed you need to have figured out your strategic plan by about age 15 and then execute on it in order to have the same life that someone born in 1930 could just happen into without much thought.