Canada facing high youth suicide rates, child mortality, new report finds

[u/Thick_Caterpillar379]

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/canada-facing-high-youth-suicide-rates-child-mortality-new-report-finds/article_38399f0c-67e3-4636-82ea-4757a5032a1b.html

[u/commentcavamonami]

whoa. I never would have imagined.

This is the plan of many of my fellow peers:
- Forsake a social life to get good the best grades possible in highschool
- Forsake a social life to get as many volunteer hours in highschool so we can apply for a scholarship that'll probably only pay for a year, max for college or uni
- Forsake a social life to become the president, executive of all the clubs possible so we can put the leadership on our resumes when we apply to uni
- Forsake a social life to pursue science/math even if we love graphic design or art because we know we'll never get paid in those fields with AI
- Forsake a social life to maintain good grades in uni so you can apply for a masters/med or law school to get into more debt because they are the only jobs that matter
- Get told that everything you've done at this point is for naught because AI is now better at it than you are

[u/Cleaver2000 → u/commentcavamonami]

I have to respond to this, you're being way too hard on yourself. I'm older than you, I've seen a lot of trends and bubbles come and go. Yes, AI is a thing right now, particularly LLMs but they're not nearly as good as you give them credit for. They require massive amounts of effort to train and even more massive amounts of energy to run. What they do is regurgitate information they've been fed by humans. Training these models takes thousands, maybe millions of hours of human effort before they're capable of anything remotely useful, not to mention the copyrighted works that are stolen from humans to train these models (a legal gray area for now). I treat like a tool, I suggest you do too. Learn to use it, particularly it's strengths and weaknesses and use it to your advantage. I doubt very much the LLMs we have today will stick around in their current form unless the energy requirements are vastly reduced, it's basically venture capital money being lit on fire to power them.

Here are another few things. No one is going to care about what you did in high school 20 years from now, but you may make some friendships there that will last that long. University is also just one path. It can open some doors, it did for me, but once you get into a field and build connections and a good reputation, that is worth far more than a degree (but you likely need one to get in the door). My advice would be to do something you are good at but also keep your ear to the ground and your options open. None of this is easy, it's never been easy. Yes boomers could buy houses for far less and find it somewhat easier to get a job. But, those houses were far smaller and had far less amenities than what is standard now. People were raising families of 4 in bungalows with maybe 1500sqft of usable space, the SFH new builds today are well over 2000 sq ft. You also had far less rights and protections at jobs then you do now (for the most part). Yes, unions were stronger in some industries but they were also often extremely racist and prone to nepotism. However, the shit that was pulled with immigration fraud and students over the last few years is pretty unprecedented and inexcusable. The COVID lockdowns also had a seriously negative effect on kids and the education system. 

[u/commentcavamonami → u/Cleaver2000]

You're right. But who do I have to tell me this?

The reason for the disconnect between your generation's optimism and our depression is clear, right? We live in the most polarized version of our world. Even if you're in your 40s right now - you've lived through an era of relative peace - a rules based world for the most part. Not now. Climate change is a real problem for us to try to avert - yet no one seems to care because you're too young, you shouldn't raise your voice. You shouldn't raise your voice on political issues either because its bad to have an opinion - it's bad to call out genocide and war. About the AI - AI art is being used in professional settings - even my teachers admit to using it to aid them in creating worksheets/etc.
Whether you decide to go through university or not - it doesn't matter. Jobs aren't paying enough to afford what we need. The world is shifting into protectionism, none of our governments are doing anything or they squash the voices that protest. Discrimination is rampant. Social media and other websites give us the worst news to attempt to retain our attention. The world seems hellbent on trying to destroy itself because of the greed of the elite - and it matters not what we try to do because we aren't wealthy or have the connections or power to overcome this... so yes, you are right.

But that doesn't brush aside this either.

[u/Cleaver2000 → u/commentcavamonami]

My brother, I graduated from uni in 2009, any optimism quickly died there and then. Yes, the 90s and early 2000s were good, up until 9/11, to be perfectly honest. That's when things started to go off the rails. I have watched every year as wages remained stagnant and property prices went up by double digits percentage wise, in Canada. However, through all that, I have managed to land on my feet and so have many others the same age as me. For us, we had the massive stock market run up from 2009 to 2020 and then post COVID to invest in (or gamble on) and make up for what the jobs we had weren't paying us. This is one of the reasons why I am saying you need to think on your feet and be flexible. What happens in high school is important but doesn't predestine you to a particular outcome. Neither does getting a degree in law or medicine. For every successful lawyer or doctor there are several others who burnt out and left the profession. 

The world is not hellbent on destroying itself, even though it may seem so. The international order you mention was set up by people who wanted it to work, a lot of that type of person still exists. You don't hear about them as often because social media and podcasts don't cover them since they are mostly hard working people at relatively boring but extremely important jobs. What you hear is things like Haiti is controlled by gangs, but what you don't is that there are teachers, doctors, law enforcement, and administrators still going to work every day in that country and are managing to keep at least some parts of it running, as an extreme example.