People getting laid off while fully staffed, with good snapshots, after being put in for promotion etc… Does a human even make these decisions? Or is some AI agent flagging people based on some formula that inputs business needs/revenue from given clients and client impact metric and other metrics and then how much an employee costs, versus whether their work can be automated or offshored?
Many of us want to learn from the mistakes of 90s/2000s “college is everything” mindset that a lot of parents and school guidance counselors were into. My parents were extremely academic-minded and encouraged prioritizing getting into a good school and not worry about the money, because a degree would lead to a great career that would pay for itself easily. LOL.
How are you discussing college, student loans, and career choices with your children if they are approaching this age, or in the future when they get to high school age? Especially with respect to job market instability and AI? Are you encouraging trades? I don’t have kids of my own but I have a 19-year-old stepson, he got into a prestigious music school but his scholarship barely covered anything. We encouraged him to go to community college and transfer after his Gen Ed courses instead of going into debt for a degree in a low-paying field. My parents on the other hand would have told me to “follow my passion, it will all work out in the end!”
This is not meant to be a flex. It’s a post about cognitive and brain health.
I was an exceptionally gifted child. I probably could have tested into some kind of genius category had my parents been into that sort of thing.
At the age of three, I taught myself how to read. I didnt just learn to read - I figured it out myself.
At age 5, I guess I was really into the Sound of Music (the original with Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer) that I memorized the entire musical, word for word. I then learned how to read music and sight read (singing) and would entertain the family when told to “sing opera for grandma”
In kindergarten, I was so good at math and reading (I went to a private all-day school that had regular class subjects) that my teacher took me to a local community college to meet the students.
In elementary school I was placed in all the advanced classes and got all A’s. I read books far above my grade level. I was into advanced math and learned algebra in fifth grade and calculus in junior high.
I was also into foreign languages. I learned Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Farsi through my own independent study.
By high school, I became less exceptional and more just above average. I got A-/B+ in my AP courses and scored 1500 on my SATs, the old scoring system. I got into elite colleges/universities and did fairly well there. I think I graduated with a 3.8 at Georgetown.
Fast forward to today. I’m 37. I am solidly mediocre. I have a reasonably good job with a reasonably good salary, but I’m nothing special at work. The skills I was exceptional at as a kid, I have either forgotten (like math, I can’t do math for shit) or am very rusty (I am only fluent in a language if I use it, and that depends on where I live and what I’m doing for work). The most concerning thing is I just can’t seem to pick up new skills very well, which I need to consistently do for work. I just can’t focus, whether it’s reading material or an audio tutorial. It’s like the brain I had as a kid was a super-absorbent sponge and now it’s a falling-apart rag. I’m not just exhausted and burnt out; I feel like my threshold for exhaustion and burnout is lower than my peers.
On top of that I just have no patience or capacity to tinker around with stuff anymore, to use my brain to figure things out like I used to. I just want to check everything off my to-do list, do a workout, eat dinner, take a bubble bath, and go do bed.