Am teenager. I'm not too worried about my future because I have some decent development skills. However, a lot of my friends are depressed because a lot of these issues really aren't so far in the future as to be "too abstract." It doesn't take a huge mental leap to realize that the college educations we're about to drop $50k+ on might not help us get jobs in the near future, or that working until we die will sort of suck, or that a pregnancy is an instant game-over (but it's okay, because apparently teens don't have sex anymore), or that most of the jobs we're going to end up getting are meaningless and will soon be automated away, so why not just off ourselves right now? It's scary. I sure as hell hope that tech now is the equivalent of the factory jobs of the 40's, so by the time my skills don't matter, I'll be set or dead.
Sounds like you guys are way more in touch with this than we were. I guess it could make sense with how fast information gets around. When I was 13 the only way I would get this information would be through newspaper or TV news, which I didn't have time for.. I was playing hockey with my friends and playing video games if our parents didn't kick us outside.
I regret saying too abstract, I intended more to say this stuff was too far into the future that it would really worry me. I figured we were smart enough that by the time I got older we'd figure out a way to make life easier for everyone.
There are a lot of memes that go around people my age/younger than me (I'm 24), that make reference to depression / the fact that people don't really think that they have a chance at making a decent life. It's a humorous take on it, but it's manifesting a deeper anxiety, and it seems to have become a big thing in the past two years or so.
I moved to America about 18 months ago from New Zealand, and noticed that while Americans have more "stuff" they carry a lot more anxiety too. There's a lot less room for error. I think that's the same thing that's happened over generations. We've squeezed the big things - wages, housing prices, middle-class jobs and pumped up our general consumption. So we have more, but less security.
