To feel sad watching all these kids going to school

[Artvanderrlay]

and wondering what sort of world they are going to enter when they turn 18 or 22.

I am sure many will excel but I fear a large number will end up financially insecure for most of their life.

When I graduated all those moons ago, I joined a graduate scheme, nothing fancy like investment bank, law or consultancy, it was with a well known high street retailer and I was earning around £23k, but many of my fellow grads were homeowners in their mid 20s, and their financial security is almost exclusively down to purchasing a property when they were so young.

A friend, who joined my scheme 3 years before me, purchased a flat in W12 for £240k in the early 00s. Her father was a postie and her mother worked part time in a supermarket, so the purchase was driven solely by her. She sold the flat this year for £800k, having rented it out for almost 15 years.

She is going to use the money to get her children onto the property ladder as soon as possible.

I was able to purchase my first flat 2.5 years after finishing university. A similar flat recently sold for £500k. There is no way I would have been able to do that now, and it terrifies what is going to happen to all these kids when they try to make their way into the world.

Their future is unimaginable. AI alone is going to transform the world. At a certain point it will become cleverer than the cleverest human. Then twice as clever, then ten times as clever, then a thousand times as clever. There is no limit. But it isn’t just AI. The kids you see running up the path to school today may live to see the following:

• The end of human ageing
• Gene editing
• Advanced nanotechnology
• Virtual Reality that is indistinguishable from real reality
• The end of physical and mental illness
• Self-driving cars
• Human -like robots doing alll the work
• Mass migration into space

No doubt some things won’t live up the hype, but others will. In 1900 people laughed at the Wright brothers and their feeble attempts to fly a plane. All they could do was send a wooden joke bouncing along a field before diving nose first into a ditch. Within seventy years we were walking on the Moon.

To be honest, a lot of that is pretty frightening.

Will it free us from physical and mental constraints? Will we really be healthier? Our children are becoming more sedentary, and seduced by technology, AI, social media, all causing great anxiety and poorer health.

I know not everyone is affected the same way and not all children are the same, but it's scary how much we hsve come to rely on these things that are supposed to help. Maybe George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, et al were onto something 🤔

The vast number of young people has probably doubled since your day and it’s too many. Intermediate qualifications for the less academic are not good enough and difficult to source, and there are too few apprenticeships. Young people are being promised a degree gets them a good job but IFS research 5 years ago shows this is rubbish for some degrees. We need a cull in degrees and a boost in higher education below degree level. The big problem is work though. This is disappearing.

There is no reason whatsover to believe that young people will have an awful future. I don't really get why the message has been put about so much that people just believe it, even though it makes no sense. Is it some sort of campaign from a foreign power that realised a hopeless population is an easy one to defeat?

Every single generation has hurdles and every single generation navigates them somehow. Stop with this pointless wallowing, it is genuinely toxic. Try to resist stupid narratives about endlessly rocketing house prices - that's not how economies work.

The most likely scenario is that due to a falling birthrate, a person born now will be massively in demand as an adult. Countries will do anything to attract them - jobs, houses, huge salaries.

My daughter has just started an apprenticeship as a heavy vehicle mechanic for the city transport service.

She wanted to future proof herself. She studied economics at uni but as a graduate just could not get a foothold despite having a degree that was "useful". The graduate jobs are being replaced by AI (admin etc.)

She saw the apprenticeship being advertised on the side of a bus and decided to apply. She was accepted and we are very happy that at least within her lifetime her job won't be given to AI to do. She's in a well paid government job now.

It's worth remembering that if you were born to a poor family in 1890, there was every danger you would die of starvation. Going to war was a good option as, if it didn't kill you, it would give you a life (what a choice). Sitting around worrying about not owning a house is a hugely privileged position.

Sorry to be negative but there will never be another boom until billionaires are taxed properly. They're currently taking so much money out of the economy that it will not recover and will get worse.

Oh and as someone who works a lot in AI, let me tell you it is a bubble. In 2030 we'll be saying 'remember when AI was supposed to do all this?' It will be there, but in the same way as word processors and payment platforms, as a boring technology that helps somewhat. The hype around it being super intelligent is laughable - it's pure and utter nonsense.

Computers did take jobs, it may not have happened as quickly as predicted and it may have even created jobs in associated industries but they aren’t jobs that your average unskilled worker can apply for. Go in a supermarket and see how many jobs have been taken by self check outs have taken or ask accountants how many small business use their services now that apps can do that work for them for far cheaper.

I hope I’m not the only one who was shocked to read that post! And the poster apparently not thinking it was excessive - how mean of her dh to ask her to cut it down a bit!

Deciding that person x is going to be lifelong miserable is depressing and unnecessary. Yes it will be tricky.
yes it is not fair. Yes it was easier before.
You cannot allow life to be defined by it for those who are able to get qualification and to get on career progression. But it is same for all. Options like live in guardian and later shared ownership. It is what it is until more decent social housing is built.
Young people in my team get on with it because what else can they do?

I've got one at uni and one starting an apprenticeship and I feel the exact same. One will have ridiculous debt and the other is doing a career that whilst booming now, is likely to become a robot job.

@IAmQuiteNiceActually Are they? So they don’t employ anyone? Don’t spend anything? Just take? Maybe check your knowledge of how an economy works. The richest economies have the richest people driving the economy forward.

I don’t worry too much tbh, every generation has its challenges and they learn to navigate them.

Assuming my DC don’t choose to move south, house prices where I am are mostly affordable particularly for a starter flat. They will both have support to think about the type of future they want and the kind of job they’ll need to sustain that lifestyle. They’ll find their way and do ok.

Yes, we are saving for our kids' properties. Also, their degrees, so that they don't end up with debt. AI will kill a lot of jobs but it will create new ones - the job market will be transformed, but we don't yet know how. There will be new jobs and new skills that our kids will have to learn. Manual work will be safe for a while, but not sure for how long when the robots start flooding us (robot deliveries will probably start in 10 years). If someone has a kid now starting uni, I would say, don't waste the money on studying languages or any type of admin, as these jobs will be dead (are dying out now). Learn German/Mandarin, but study science, architecture, finance, medical, etc.

I suppose the difference is people of our generation had the opportunity for both of those options.

Which is why, as a society, we need to reconfigure the centrality of property ownership to ideas of a good life.

Architecture is already going to AI - my architect has been telling me all about it.

The key is to teach your child to think for themselves. In general, technology is neutral. It's up to us what we do with it. Yes, a teenager can use the internet to look at pornography and visit self-harm websites. But they can also use it to order any book from anywhere in the world. Imagine a clever 15-year-old girl who has started reading, say, Virginia Woolf or Jane Austen. When I was young, if you wanted to find out more about a writer (or artist or singer), you'd have to get a bus into town, go into the local library, and hope there was a biography on the shelf. Now, at the click of a mouse, you can find out limitless information. You can print off essays on their novels, or order any book ever written on them to your door.

Assuming climate change and nuclear weapons don't wipe us out, our medicine should improve exponentially. Truth is, we're still in the medical dark ages. We can barely cure a thing. Not only do we have no cure for cancer or dementia or Parkinsons or MS, we can't even cure things like male pattern baldness or acne or hemorrhoids or insomnia or depression. Yes, we can 'treat' them. But so can a tribal witch doctor. And, frankly, in some cases I'd have more faith in the witch doctor. Like most people I have all sorts of chronic, niggling miseries – insomnia, migraines, anxiety, back problems, etc. Nothing works.

I was listening to someone on a podcast who said that by the late 2030s (when today's primary school kids are in their 20s), people will look at photos and videos of their grandparents in disbelief. They'll shake their heads and say "eww, yuk, did people really used to look like that?" Thanks to advances in nanotech and gene editing and anti-ageing drugs, people in the future will look much younger and prettier than they do today. It's hard to see how that can be a bad thing. As an ugly teen, I can tell you it's horrible being unattractive. Absolutely horrible. If gene editing can make everyone young and beautiful, then great. Being old and ill and ugly is dreadful.

Yes, the young face problems. In 1900 the world's population was one billion. Today it's eight billion, and we're going to hit ten billion right in the middle of climate meltdown. Births may be falling in the West, but in Africa the birth rate is so high the African population is going to double. Then of course there's nuclear weapons and the unpredictable impact of AI. But my god they have a lot to be exited about as well.

@abathofmilkwithladydi the cognitive dissonance is strong!

It's not AI which we need to fear, it's greed, and those at the top increasing their already vast wealth while everyone else's standard of living goes down, when there is absolutely no need for it to.

I think it is much much harder for the younger ones.

My parents- mother stayed home, no childcare and they lived in a university post grad apartment at like £10 all bills included whilst they saved for a house. Mother not working within a year they brought. They soon saved enough for another house which they rented and a property abroad.

As a young single parent earning a decent salary £40 K they said they would help me to buy - all I needed to do was save a deposit. I gave them my income, rent, bills and childcare written down - they wasn’t a penny left nothing. I was in a 2 bed flat. They berated me and said I needed to live cheaper - how?? Just how.

My salary has gone up 6 K in the last 20 years. My outgoings are huge- without my husband we wouldn’t have this house. He paid for it. Meanwhile my parents house for which they paid £70K in 1980 is now worth over £800 K - they can’t see it. Not a 100% increase that would be £140 K my parents could never see it. Ever.

We’ve accepted our kids will be living with us a lot longer and consequently will not be charging them rent/keep provided they all save up towards a house deposit

It’s not just houses though - we’ve a son who has just passed his driving test. Trying to find a car that’s even reasonably priced is insane - and then the insurance is ridiculous. £3k insurance on a ten year old Ford Fiesta that’s costing £5.5k - make it make sense!!!!

My sister bought a house in 2000 for £65k - it’s now worth £500k. Our house was bought ten years ago for £128k and is now worth £250k.

And there’s a new estate near us selling ‘first time buyer’ properties for £350k!!! Tiny 2 up 2 down style properties with hardly any garden. We are in the North West of England for reference.

The entire country is utterly f*cked.

Oh gosh, this made me chuckle - old and ill and ugly definitely isnt pretty, I agree! I'd give my right arm to be young and healthy again after a decade of poor health, after a head injury and post concussion syndrome before being injured by an off label antipsychotic 😢

Youth is definitely wasted on the young...!

Funnily enough, i have sort of been able to access to health care of the "future" and had a pharmacogenetics test that showed that I couldn't metabolise the drug types like antidepressants and antipsychotics. Shame it was something that i knew after being injured and having a permanent neurological movement disorder 😕

I’m not sure how old you are OP but for my cohort, graduating from top 10 universities in the mid 90s, it was very much a struggle. Even those on grad schemes weren’t in a position to buy their first flat until the age of 30 or so if working in London. It was definitely a struggle financially and many of us were living below the poverty line for a few years after graduating. Not saying that it’s not challenging for young adults now, but I keep seeing threads conflating what it was like for some boomers (an anomaly) with the experience of generations before and after.