Midlife crisis is going to be a bitch-and-half for these folks. And that's exactly when they'll be running the country. Can't wait for that!

Ugh. Being a lifelong slacker, unlike these schedule-fetishists, I have nothing more articulate to say.

Ugh.

Interesting article. It's from 2001 though, so most of those students should be out of college by now.

This study was interesting. It suggests that the economic climate when you're 18-24 has a permanent affect on your views:

Recession-influenced respondents expressed a stronger preference for government redistribution and tended to believe that success in life was more a matter of luck than hard work.

So, hopefully that generation will be balanced out by the children of the recession.

As a slacker, I hesitate to do the work to articulate something articulate. Still, I'm always suspicious of David Brooks so I'm motivated to try and say something for that reason, if no other.

He's concerned with the lack of values vocabulary from which he deduces a lack of values, though he can't quite seem to locate it in the behavior of the "kids." It's the usual problem where the party of values gets to betray those values and still criticize that other party for the even worse sin of lacking values. These students weren't plagiarizing but there was no way to tell them that it was bad. Would they, at least, feel tempted to plagiarize so they could experience the moral struggle? Can you be good if you do not know evil?

I see this as a lack of empathy on the part of Mr. Brooks. Since he doesn't see the moral struggle, he believes it to be absent, and he doesn't see it, in part, because he doesn't share the vocabulary of his interviewees. One reason is that his vocabulary of choice has been (evilly) stolen and debased. The "values" community (or the "do as I say, not as I do" community) has taken morality and turned it into a tool of manipulation and judgment.

I'm always suspicious of David Brooks

Ditto. His sample pool is pretty darn small and handpicked, as well. These kinds of kids were around when I was in college, but it would be a stretch to do much forecasting about the state of the world from them.

I had one rule in college: The latest bedtime I ever would have would be 2 am. What this meant was if a paper wasn't done at 2am, it wasn't done. If I wasn't done studying at 2am, I probably wouldn't know what I was studying anyways. Obviously, weekends were different, but I refused to pull an "all-nighter" over something as silly as a paper or an exam.

gc, that's exactly the attitude my parents imposed on me when I went to college. However, until that point, I was expected to stay awake and be perfectly polite and chipper if there were things that still needed to be done.

It was kind of horrifying to read that article because so much of it made sense for the bullshit I was raised with. I remember in second grade (when I was about 6-7), I had an activity every day of the week after school. There were modeling classes, Girl Scouts, aerobics classes, ballet, and a bunch of others. Second grade was when my brain first decided that this whole life thing wasn't really going to work out and I wound up in the guidance counselor's office more than once. I still can barely read an analog clock because I just kinda gave up on school at that point.

It's not like it got better either when I started to get older and actually have friends. I couldn't go out. If my parents didn't feel like driving me (since I had no friends that lived closer than a 20 minute drive away)--I couldn't get picked up by one of their parents to hang out. If there was a party, I was only permitted to stay for an hour or so, and I had to prove that I had completed everything that was required of me. Then there was all the volleyball bullshit that quickly started to fill my schedule. I had club practices at least 2 times a week. Tournaments happened just about every weekend (all day events from around 5am-midnight or later). In high school, I would have school practices M-F plus the 2 or more club practices at night, with tournaments on the weekends still.

Even now, since I'm all alone, I find it hard to not constantly berate myself for not being busy all the time. I'm working on it though and trying to realize that chilling out and watching a movie isn't a waste of time. I still don't have many friends and I likely never really will. How much of that is just general introversion and how much of it is just due to missing out on that whole phase--I don't really know. I do think that people are missing something potentially very important when every minute of every day is scheduled.

Then again, I'm all fucked in the head and should probably be one of those that is medicated within an inch of their lives, so I'm probably full of shit anyways. My parents just refused to believe that there could ever be anything wrong with their perfect little snowflake that loud arguments and shouting matches couldn't cure.

Wow, sperose, for what it's worth, I can't imagine growing up with every minute scheduled. That idea is just horrifying to me, and suggests that I shouldn't necessarily be blaming these kids for their OCD overachieving-ness.