Today’s teens: too much Final Destination, too little financial planning

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When I was 16, it took a lot to convince me that I wasn’t immortal. But two car accidents, a few hospital visits, several dead grandparents later, and I kinda got the message.

If only today’s youth had that same luxury. According to a new study in this month’s Journal of Adolescent Health, a vastly disproportionate percentage of teenagers are convinced they’ll die within the next year. Researchers polled around 300 students in junior high and high school about their perceived mortality. A whopping 19 percent were pretty darn sure they’d be kicking it within a year, and a similar percentage were confident that they’d be dead by the age of 20.

And no, these weren’t high-risk youth living in dangerous neighborhoods. They all lived in the San Francisco Bay area, with a parent or guardian, and 77 percent were Caucasian. Very few had ever been the victims of a violent crime, and when asked to rank how safe they felt at school on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being very safe), the mean stat was 1.82. In spite of cozy living situations, those polled still sleep with one eye open: one-fifth anticipate being victimized by violent crime sometime before next year.

Either researchers accidentally chose their sample pool from a San Francisco dramatic arts camp, or teenagers have been watching a few too many horror flicks and playing a bit too much Grand Theft Auto. In reality, only around 0.6 percent of the teens are statistically likely to die anytime soon. And chances are, it’ll be something kind of boring, like a congenital heart defect.

But what really caught my eye here was the extreme behavior that the researchers seem to blame on teen mortality complexes. Whereas I figured a teen obsessed with their own imminent doom would be locked up in their bedroom, prepping that last will and testament, study authors had a different idea:

Adolescents’ willingness to prepare for the future depends, in part, on their confidence in living long enough to get a return on that investment. If life seems fragile, then why study hard, create stable relationships, or delay the pleasures of potentially risky behaviors such as sex or driving?

So, if you’ve got a teenager who blows away their spending money, fails math tests and just drove the family van into a tree, it’s time to sit down for a chat. He’s not hormonal – he’s just living every day like it’s his last. Because, if the dead-to-alive ratio in Halloween II can be believed, it is.