It's not clear that kids in Palo Alto really are killing themselves at unusually high rates over the long term. There was a recent suicide cluster there, but any event that is random will clump in some location some time, and maybe there is nothing about Palo Alto itself that produced the recent clump. For sure, any event that happens in Palo Alto grabs the connection of well connected people who can get lots of media attention for their concerns, so there has been a lot of reporting and commentary about this issue. This article kindly submitted for our discussion from the Modern Luxury website is just the latest in a large collection of articles by nonspecialists on suicide in Palo Alto. But maybe the problem will appear to go away as the random clumping of individual suicides occurs in some poorer and less well connected community next year.
Of course I desire for all young people everywhere to live long, healthy, and happy lives, and if there is something toxic about the culture in Palo Alto, let's by all means do something to fix it. But one part of that effort is to better understand suicide and its prevention, a topic I post about fairly often here on Hacker News. (Check my other posts just from today. I research this issue a lot.) A lot of the commentary I have read about Palo Alto this year has been heavy on speculation but very light on verifiable facts, and I think, with all due respect, that an important issue like youth suicide deserves to be treated factually and carefully.
The mantra of the fundamental materialist is always "it is only a coincidence" and it is quite useful to recite to explain away topics that might make one uncomfortable. Another good one is "correlation is not equal to causation" (except when it agrees with my preconceived reality tunnel). If you repeat it enough times or with enough conviction it might even start to sound true!
I attended Gunn in 2006 and this was happening in waves before I got there and continues to happen in waves since. There are guards that sit by the tracks (sometimes 24/7) to look out for students who are looking to take their lives in this specific way (buy them a coffee or donut on a cold night, they'll appreciate it). This is occurring at one of the most educated, affluent areas in the world. Hell even Radiohead poked fun at how perfect the place is. My AP CS class covered topics that weren't even included in my undergraduate CS degree at top ranked UC, and my social network from this school is more influential than any networks I made in college or graduate school.
If the suicide rate did meet some statistical "norm" then that would be exceptional. Why are kids killing themselves in utopia? Why are some of the worlds most intelligent, rich, and power adults burying their children?
>If the suicide rate did meet some statistical "norm" then that would be exceptional. Why are kids killing themselves in utopia? Why are some of the worlds most intelligent, rich, and power adults burying their children?
Gunn '08 graduate here. It's because these intelligent, rich, and powerful adults are used to pushing themselves to the max, and they put the same pressure on their kids. However, not all children are like their parents, and a lot of them can't take the pressure.
Growing up in Palo Alto is weird, especially if you've lived somewhere else. Everyone is pigeonholed into being academically successful, creative, bright, and happy. All the parents want their children to be successful like they are. All the teachers want to create a demanding and rigorous academic environment that pushes these kids to the limit. But no one ever asks the children what they want, or gives them room to develop an identity of their own.
Instead, from the age of 7 you're expected to spend 8:00am - 3:00pm in school. After school your schedule is stuffed with extracurricular activities, ranging from sports to speech and debate to Kumon. Then you get home around 6-7pm and work on homework til midnight. Get up the next morning at 6:45am, rinse and repeat.
If you don't follow this schedule, if you opt out and don't take the required extra-curriculars or get a B in Algerba 2A/Geometry instead of an A, you're viewed as a loser. You're on the path to becoming a nobody in life. You're nothing.
So kids opt out by getting shit grades, playing video games, doing drugs, and some have serious mental issues and end up killing themselves. The adults then all get up in a panic. The teachers make long speeches about how they're here to help. The parents go to meetings and undertake inane measures such as posting guards at Caltrain, which doesn't really do anything.
Meanwhile, nothing changes. The teachers continue to assign an insane academic load, and give no room to the kids to breathe with the endless homework assignments. The parents continue pressuring their kids, because "yeah that other kid killed himself, but surely that won't happen to my child. My child will grow up to be smart happy and ambitious like me..."
Extracurriculars should be radically optional, especially
if the kids are actually doing homework until midnight. that's just not enough zone out time.
With my own kids, if they didn't absolutely love something, I always recommended them to drop it. They both found one, maybe two things that they loved and added value, and that seems to have worked out.
One of them made a living for a span of time talking college student who grew up that way off the proverbial ledge when it all melted down. But she'd also had enough freedom to e-publish a book by the time she was 12.
Growing up, the people that over-regimented their children's live were called "Colonel von Trapp" by my parents, in my presence, possibly to their face.
>The parents continue pressuring their kids, because "yeah that other kid killed himself, but surely that won't happen to my child. My child will grow up to be smart happy and ambitious like me..."
That's what they think, yes. But from my own experience, environments like this cultivate a uniquely desperate sort of ambition -- they manufacture people who cannot fathom achieving anything less than what their parents have.
Something different isn't merely an alternative path. Instead, it's abject failure and a crisis of identity.
I wasn't particularly well-adjusted coming out of a secondary school pressure-cooker, but after struggling with alcohol addiction for a while eventually managed to chart my own course.
It's tragic that some teenagers take their own lives before they have that chance.
> Why are kids killing themselves in utopia? Why are some of the worlds most intelligent, rich, and power adults burying their children?
I think the ideas that Palo Alto is "utopia," and that intelligence, wealth and power are all you need to make your children happy, are really quite telling. Perhaps expensive houses and influential careers are orthogonal to children's happiness and well-being, or perhaps even an intensely competitive career- and wealth-focused environment has negative side-effects with respect to one's family?
I don't think that suburban ennui is anything new, and equating affluence and education to happiness is short-sighted in my mind.
Anecdotal, but there are studies out there in child/family studies that back my experience: I'm a foster parent. My foster kids have more access to the riches of the world... are less hungry, have more toys, have more movies, bigger TVs, etc. Not to mention, I treat them in such a way that doesnt get the state to want to remove them from their home. However, one of my foster kids once said to me, "I really like you and your house. You have a nicer house than my parents and more toys. But I like living with MY parents more." This kid was <7 years old when (s)he said that. Even young children recognize that there is more to a parent/child relationship than "stuff". What it boils down to is: they want to be with their families.
I've noticed that a lot of people who live in Palo Alto or similar areas work ... A LOT. Which means more time with their job and less time with their families.
Well I would hope that nobody would refer to Palo Alto as "utopia" unironically, but unfortunately that is basically the attitude that the Bay Area and California as a whole do seem to hold about themselves. It oozes from the place in a way that's more than a little offensive to visiting outsiders.
> Why are kids killing themselves in utopia? Why are some of the worlds most intelligent, rich, and power adults burying their children?
Really? So you create a hyper-competitive environment where kids are constantly expected to perform and the image of perfection is demanded. In academics, athletics, work, and social life. From kids.
Then you wonder why they off themselves when something falls through? Really?
Maybe try not demanding so much from children and allow them to gradually learn how to handle failure?
Fuck these artificial treadmills being created all over America.
> My AP CS class covered topics that weren't even included in my undergraduate CS degree at top ranked UC
This is not something to be proud of. It's sad and depressing. High school is a time for kids to learn social skills, not advanced computer science concepts.
> This is not something to be proud of. It's sad and depressing. High school is a time for kids to learn social skills, not advanced computer science concepts.
Unless they want to. I'm not entirely sure that most do.
I prefer to call it "fundamentalist positivism" or "determinism" since it is not entirely clear that material behaves like this sort of materialist thinks, and there is abundant evidence that the right hemisphere has a legitimate role in cognition.
Otherwise bravo sir. Hopefully this fundamentalism will go where other fundamentalism before it have gone.
It's sort of obvious what's happening here: over pressure and conformism to prepare kids for high end drone roles in the new global economy. But I have no proof, and of course [citation needed] and all that. Perhaps I am suffering from the Dunning-Kreuger effect. Did I hit every cliche? Dunno... extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I live near Irvine in SoCal, and I wonder if similar things occur there. It's definitely one of those places where all the kids are expected to be above average and to perform, the schools operate as feeders for top-ten universities, and the parents tend to be a tad on the helicopter side.
I have kids and rent right now. Not sure where we will buy, but it probably won't be Irvine. If my daughter ends up being (gasp!) artistic or just a "laid back" person, I don't want her jumping in front of the LA Metro Rail.
I remember reading about newly upwardly mobile African American parents in the suburbs insisting their children spend parts of the summer with their relatives and grandparents on the other side of the tracks just for this very specific reason. I wonder how much of a community there is that offers a level for these kids to feel engaged in (below PTA level) outside of their professional performance.
Suicide is common. In England suicide is the leading cause of death for men aged 20 to 34, and aged 34 to 49.
For men the rate is about 19 deaths per 100,000 people.
Suicide is less common in youths, which is why this cluster might be a statistically significant cluster. Or maybe it isn't, and it's just natural variation. We need to know the difference so that we can spend money wisely to prevent suicide; that's less likely if we don't understand where to spend the money.
Yeah, but what a first-world problem. They're killing themselves because, what, their Starbucks allowance is too small? They're living better lives than 99% of humanity through all of history. And they think they need a way out? Inconceivable.
As a person that nearly did kill himself, while attending a prime uni in my country, living a quite affluent student life (shared apartment with only one other locator, own room, enough money to not worry about it at all, motorcycle trips during weekend, etc) i have to disagree.
I became heavily disillusioned with uni - often the top ones aren't actually the best at teaching - they just get hypercompetitive due to overabundance of candidates and the staff can just be shoddy, getting results just by having unreasonable tests and test rules (some of them used to do sudden death style test - they just drone and meander offtopic during the semester, never actually covering the material, then just give an exam that has problems only tangential to the covered material. Which you can't resit. Gotta take the class again)
Then your parents are pounding on you, because you are a FAILURE. And to add insult to injury they go about telling how great their school years were and how it's going to suck when you eventually finish.
You are stuck with hypercompetitive peers, in often hostile surroundings (physical agression is the easy one)
A lot of my friends are feeling lost. I feel lost.
I still have depression - switched unis, i try to get through, do extra stuff. But the nagging feeling of inadequacy is still there
Sorry for incoherence, but that post riled me a bit
You're thinking in terms of "stuff". If you have enough "stuff" you should be happy and not commit suicide. But it's not about stuff, it's about constantly being told that you're a failure. Or constantly being made terrified of failure, even if you're not failing at this particular moment.
You are goddamn right.
That's how i feel - I am in a melee with depression and this is one of the core problems. Constant fear of failure, frustration - it often makes me disengage, stop caring, which in turn makes it all worse, since the real failures arrive. If there isn't anyone for those people to help, only to knock them down more (LOOK AT ALL THE STUFF YOU WERE GIVEN! WHY ARE YOU A FAILURE! GO STUDY! LOOK AT hypercompetitive peer WHY CANT YOU BE LIKE HIM)
> They're killing themselves because, what, their Starbucks allowance is too small?
If we're going to use simplifications of this cartoonish level, a more accurate (but still uselessly simplified) one probably would be "because they are surrounded by people for who think they should be happy because of the size of their Starbucks allowance".
> They're living better lives than 99% of humanity through all of history.
From the perspective of people who think that quality of life is identical to material riches; but while those things might be generally correlated, they aren't the same thing, and its quite possible to have low quality of life with plenty of material riches. And the fact that lots of people fail to recognize that exacerbates the problems of people who experience low quality of life while having material riches.
No, the rest of the world is happy with earning a living, having their health, and keeping themselves surrounded by family and friends. Weirdly enough, most of the world takes those last two items (family and friends) for granted, while Americans tend to throw away the last three (health, family, friends) for the sake of careerism.
“It was not their irritating assumption of equality that annoyed Nicholai so much as their cultural confusions. The Americans seemed to confuse standard of living with quality of life, equal opportunity with institutionalized mediocrity, bravery with courage, machismo with manhood, liberty with freedom, wordiness with articulation, fun with pleasure - in short, all of the misconceptions common to those who assume that justice implies equality for all, rather than equality for equals.”
― Trevanian, Shibumi
True, guilty as charged. I lived and worked in Palo Alto for years, and saw firsthand how pampered the yuppie offspring were. I have a profound lack of empathy for them, coming from my Iowa farm upbringing where work was a fact of life, where failure meant disaster for the family, so you were damn sure to do it right the first time.
I assumed the article has plenty of upper-class empathy for their plight, where they get asked to work and don't know how, so they feel like a failure. Did I get it wrong?
It's easy to look down your nose at them if you didn't have it "as good" but if you turned out more well adjusted maybe you are the one with a childhood to be envied.
Yes. The article mostly talks about intense academic and socioeconomic pressures where kids are working > 12-hour days (between school, 4-6 hours of homework, and mandatory extracurricular everything). "Getting a B is a failure."
They're killing themselves because their entire environment conveys to them that either they will be the very best, like no-one ever was, at everything, or they will wind up flipping burgers and living their lives in poverty -- no third options, no alternative lifestyles. Devote your soul to careerism, or wallow in eternal poverty and exploitation.
Exactly. I can't help but feel like the kind of parents who would let their child get to this point, or the peers of such parents, take some perverse pleasure in their children's deaths.
"Is adult entertainment killing our children, or is killing our children entertaining adults?" - Marilyn Manson
Not to mention the peers of the deceased, who probably have a similar sense of schadenfreude. The funny thing is you used to have to draft these kids to go to war to kill em with any efficiency---now you just feed them a line of bullshit (about grades and success or whatever) and they'll kill each other (and themselves) willingly right at home!
My kids attend a different Silicon Valley school that has an academic culture that I find very difficult to understand. A very high number of students load up on college-level advanced placement courses starting their sophomore year. A 'B' is considered a failing grade. What is baffling to me is that the bulk of the pressure is peer pressure, and not directly from teachers or parents. It is typical that kids who transfer to high schools in other states wind up as valedictorians, where they'd barely make the top 10% here.
Jocks, burnouts and socialites seems so, so long ago.
I guess if you're a kid living in Palo Alto, you are living in an environment where everyone and everyone's parents are high achievers and that is what is expected of you. In order to get admitted to the best colleges, everyone is gunning for the straight A's. If all your peers are getting straight A's and you get a B, yea I can see how that can have an impact on you, seeing that that now takes you to the bottom of the rankings.
I do not live in Palo Alto and I have never been to Silicon Valley either. I would like to ask what you think about this culture of over achievers telling their kids (via social pressure or directly) that they need good grades when all I can here is that you should not care about grades if you want to become a great entrepreneur.
That seems quite a paradox to me but again, I'm just hearing echoes of propaganda from SF. Could it be that people actually buy the "entrepreneur / do-it-your-way bullshit" for themselves but fear to apply it to their kids?
Also, I'd like to point out that most of the greatest scientific minds of our era did get mediocre grades in school (I'm not talking about the Gates or Jobs college dropout fairytale).
It's simple: For every runaway-success person with crappy grades, there are ten people with great success and great grades, and a hundred if not a thousand people with no success (or even failure) and crappy grades.
If you make a simple "expected success" calculation, much like the expected value concept, you will see that you should encourage your kids to have good grades. It really does make a difference, maybe not directly, but as a correlation with other stuff, most def.
Basically, do not base your life strategy on black swan events. That works for VCs because they make a lot of bets. You are an individual and only get to make one bet. You want that bet to pay off.
If you're going to be a black swan, your grades won't matter. If you aren't, and you likely aren't, they will.
"Could it be that people actually buy the 'entrepreneur / do-it-your-way bullshit' for themselves but fear to apply it to their kids?"
I sense that this is a very wise observation. I know college dropouts with large homes in the Palo Alto area who take their kids on east-coast college tours via private aircraft. These kids might be better served getting lost in the Andes, but many parents wouldn't hear of such a notion.
@Swizec: That's for sure but I'm not talking about the benefits of getting good grades. I'm talking about a culture that oppresses children and fixates everything on grades when what counts is that your child is happy and intellectually sound which I do agree is somehow related to grades in school (related like correlation, not causation).
I think many of the 'greatest scientific minds' got mediocre grades because they were so smart that school bored them. They did not find them challenging enough so that didn't have the motivation to participate in class.
The tech college dropouts like Bill Gates (Harvard) and Zuckerberg (Harvard) probably worked hard to get into their alma mater. I think still think good grades are a good indication of future success.
> Could it be that people actually buy the "entrepreneur / do-it-your-way bullshit" for themselves but fear to apply it to their kids?
Most of the Gunn students' parents aren't on HN, nor are they entrepreneurs (nor are most people on HN entrepreneurs). For the record, suburban Palo Alto is also very different from SOMA in SF. I know that this seems like a very _minor_ distinction to outsiders, but it matters: the kids (and their parents) aren't usually exposed to folks living with roommates, those who are "getting by" with freelance jobs while building more valuable career skills, and so on...
> Also, I'd like to point out that most of the greatest scientific minds of our era did get mediocre grades in school (I'm not talking about the Gates or Jobs college dropout fairytale).
A mediocre grade, by definition is a C. While I'm
willing to concede that one doesn't need straight A's to be a scientist, it's hard to see how one could make any contribution to a relevant STEM field with C-graded understanding of basic algebra and proofs (without, e.g., making up for it elsewhere such as via community college courses taken on the side or re-taking those courses in a university).
I'll say without hesitation that "take hard courses, don't worry about dragging down your GPA by a few points" is _great_ advice, but that's not the same as "all else being equal, mediocre grades have no consequences."
However, that advice implies getting to a university in the first place, and that's the problem students in Palo Alto are facing: even ten years ago (when I was graduating HS/entering college -- note I graduated from Monta Vista HS, a school that's somewhat similar to Gunn, but ahem -- farther from Stanford and Caltrain) the perception (which isn't the entire story, but still has a strong basis in reality) was that 1) one can't get into a good (UC Berkeley, UCLA, or another equivalent public or private university; Stanford or MIT are a different matter altogether...) university without a (I'm using the older SAT scale...) 1400+ SAT score and 3.8+ GPA 2) without attending and graduating from a good university, one may still have a decent career, but one will be less secure (whether financially or in terms of career mobility, job satisfaction, or even selection of romantic partners) in other ways. I don't think the situation got any better since then, if anything it intensified greatly after the 2008 crisis (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_is_Over).
(Note: there are definite advantages to attending a name-brand university, but it isn't -- at least, yet -- the absolute requirement, without which one will never be admitted to the a rewarding and successful career.)
I highly recommend arranging a screening of the documentary
"A Race to Nowhere". It was an eye opener for me and other parents in Los Alamos (a NM town with many similarities I think) and places this peer pressure into proper perspective for parents, kids, as well as teachers.
Not that I think this is conscious, per se, but I think part of it might be driven by the need for their school to be a "top school." It's not enough just to take AP courses and get As, the overall ranking of the school you do it at ends up affecting your admission chances. Staff might have similar concerns around funding.
That probably puts a lot of pressure on all the students to keep up the standard, probably past a level that makes sense for any diverse student body.
It's generally either-or. If you're a jock, you are not academic. The varsity teams are poor at my kids school because most kids in sports as freshman and sophomores drop out of the teams as juniors and seniors to focus more on academics.
My sense is that it's cultural, and not clustering. The kids have an awful lot of academic pressure. In most schools, the mediocre football players just give up on the team. These kids don't feel able to quit the academics.
I was a telephone volunteer for the Suicide Prevention Service of Santa Cruz County in the late 1980s.
It is common for suicides to happen in clusters whose numbers cannot be explained by the clustering which does indeed happen in random number distributions.
Having experienced suicidal depression for a number of years, and having attempted it several times, I can speak from experience as to why the clustering occurs: profoundly depressed people find creativity difficult.
Suppose you wanted to kill yourself, were quite desperate to make it all end. But to do so you'd have to obtain the means of your own destruction. That's pretty hard to do, when you can't even get off the couch to make your breakfast.
There are all manner of ways that we could take our lives, but they don't occur to most people. Having a specific mechanism suggested to use - where the "suggestion" is provided by someone who does take their own life - provides us the mental wherewithal to obtain it ourselves.
It is for this reason that groups such as I once volunteered for, advise the press not to name the specific means use, when reporting on suicides.
Please permit me to be wildly off-topic but for a moment:
A regard it as obvious by inspection that any truly random sequence of numbers will contain arbitrarily many sequences of any arbitrary sequence of numbers. It is for that reason that I regard one time pads that consist of truly random numbers as insufficiently strong cryptography.
That is, while exceedingly unlikely, the cleartext "attack at dawn" could well encrypt to the ciphertext "attack at dawn".
Of course I desire for all young people everywhere to live long, healthy, and happy lives, and if there is something toxic about the culture in Palo Alto, let's by all means do something to fix it. But one part of that effort is to better understand suicide and its prevention, a topic I post about fairly often here on Hacker News. (Check my other posts just from today. I research this issue a lot.) A lot of the commentary I have read about Palo Alto this year has been heavy on speculation but very light on verifiable facts, and I think, with all due respect, that an important issue like youth suicide deserves to be treated factually and carefully.