[Yuki Maru Hoshi]

Originally Posted by arista

Yeah, so... I went to college in that area... there's a maturity difference between young people in that neck of the woods and the young people back home. The young who were attending college in TX had jobs, paid their own car notes and were forced to be self-sufficient. But more importantly, they had lives outside of the academic bubble. Glamorous campus life wasn't a thing and it wasn't practical for people's schedules. Many 18 year olds held jobs and were paying their own car notes when I was in high school. Their parents who worked very hard and were blue collar, so they expected it. So yeah, that's how I knew life...

In Central MD, the demographics are much more stratified (as in hyper poor with hyper rich... often the latter). Many of the parents are VERY well-connected and lead sheltered lives themselves, some for practical reasons (the nature of their work, national security, needing to travel constantly, etc...). So while the young people there live "very well", they hardly live at all in comparison to my TX peers. You could try to have conversations about "real life", but they didn't experience it, so it was often "Well, I know someone who does that", "My parents know a person", "My parents do that".. but never first hand experience of most anything. So I guess if living like this, it's easier to "see the point" to spend a lot more of their social time on campus absorbing group think... I don't know how else they fit in ... it was like extended childhood, so not relatable to me. A completely different atmosphere and way of growing up.

I do not think this is a "norm", but one of the incentives of extending childhood beyond high school with endless public funding and "free" education is so that the institutions have more time to mold them... that's my opinion, anyway.

Sadly, I do think it has become more common even here with younger people to stay self-absorbed and that means seeing themselves as above working 'odd jobs', passing on valuable life experience, etc. I couldn't relate to the that peer group at all as I was living on my own since 20yo and certainly not "well to do"... but I wouldn't dream of shooting a CEO or a mall over my hardships, which I had quite a few then... and I did struggle without health insurance at that time (United wouldn't even take me at the time, as I had preexisting), and could find people to be butt hurt on my behalf about such things when they will almost certainly never live that experience... which was also foreign to me It was almost like they got high of it... also this friend group was the first to introduce "trans" ideology which I just thought was a random conversation they wanted to have, not an actual ideology... but yeah, that person was deep in a Masters program then on the psych end (also MD)... (I think this was in 2010)