Today’s younger generation has a foundational contempt for us Baby Boomers.
The idea that young people can learn from older people has been discredited by social media and technology, which creates a false sense of improved knowledge.
They know everything, and better than we do. What else do they need to learn?
I understand why they live in this excessive self-indulgence that feeds on a bloated sense of self-esteem.
When I was a kid, the attitude of the older generation was limited in scope to a few dozen adults who we interacted with. Today’s youth have a false sense; they interact with millions through social media. It makes it easier for them to come to a conclusion without self-constructed thought.
It’s a new kind of “entitlement,” a new deadly sin that plagues human achievement.
They don’t need us. We dwell on a past that is far better than their lives headed towards a deteriorating future.
When I was young, intelligence was based on an exercised human mind. This generation relies on Artificial Intelligence, while their minds deteriorate.
I memorized dozens of telephone numbers. Today’s generation relies on technology to make calls.
Contacts in my generation were far more substantive. Today’s outreach is 85 percent spam. Because there is so much, there is no real substance. It is diluted. Life is crowded out by clutter that steadily accumulates and suffocates the mind into stagnation.
Why am I thinking about all this? Well, before social media, we used to talk to more people face-to-face. The discussions were deeper and more meaningful. You thought things out before you said them or wrote them. Even photographing something was the result of thoughtful decisions: you could take 24 or 36 pictures in a roll of film and you didn’t just waste them. You took the best shots, and that gave them a true meaning. Meaning has more value.
Today, we take digital pictures because we can. Our photo albums that were once easy to peruse and enjoyably browse, are not laborious struggles to sift through thousands of images including some that are repetitive of nearly the same moment. You might have a burst of 50 digital images of the same moment. How does a mind process 20,000 images? You can’t. The individual enjoyment of each picture has been replaced, bartered off to artificial intelligence, which makes the decisions.
Writing used to be the process of exercising your mind. A slow, deliberate process of deep, intelligent thought. It’s replaced by a lightning-fast system of expression where thoughts are vomited out of the mind in massive blasts in which nuance and meaning are generalized and stereotyped, and often wrong.
Accuracy and facts have been replaced with speed and opinion based on one’s personal beliefs, stereotypes, likes, and dislikes. No one gives it real thought when they react to something on Facebook. They spit it out in rapid-fire emotion, usually anger.
Praise, likes, and love are gratuitously propelled.
True intelligence is a slow and deliberate personal process of learning and expression, not a rapid marathon through empty words and phrases with no substance, just intended emotion. Happy, sad, mean, or deliberately intended to harm.
The young people don’t realize that their lifestyle decisions are being made by others driven by greed and self-enrichment.
Costs are high because we can’t keep up with the changes anymore. We have gotten used to accepting rising costs as a matter-of-fact lifestyle.
What made me think about all this? Halloween.
When I was a kid, dressing up in costume was a process. Halloween was knocking on doors. Even though many of us were poor, what we got in candy was real quality.
Large candy bars. Baby Ruths and Butterfingers that took many minutes to consume. And the longer it took to eat, the more we enjoyed it. Oh Henry bars. Chunky Bars. Bit-O-Honeys. They were all substantive. A prize we treasured.
Yes, we got Candy Corn, and small items. But the mix was far more substantive than today.
I was looking through the large bowl of the small and tiny pieces of candy we have been conditioned to buy at today’s stores. The names are big, but the content is small. We have turned large chocolate bars into new iterations of Candy Corn. Throwaways. Conditioned just to get something.
Not to mention, we don’t do this on our own anymore. Because it is not safe. The expansion and dilution of personal human contact has exposed us to harm, people who have seen and learned ways to hurt.
I pity this younger generation. They will never understand the enjoyment of substantive reward, which has been lost to degenerative efficiency and profits.
Read more on this at CourageousThought.com.
