cgf wrote:Clyde_Style wrote:Guano wrote:
i wrote an essay on how magical strip clubs were cause I was out of hs and could push boundaries. I'm embarrassed and she had every right to not like me.
young men are the worst. oh, hi melo
Young men keep getting worse these days too. Seems like the majority of high schoolers these days will never read a whole book for the rest of their lives. And if they lack street smarts they are patterned off what they consume online.
I guess that makes RealGM one helluva place to grow up
I dunno man, I feel like kids are way better than my generation ways. We bought way too hard into the "apathy is cool" BS, but they care a lot more about stuff, including each other. Kids will always be kids who don't know any better and I won't understand why they care about some of the stuff that they do, but how empathetic this new generation is really drives my optimism for the future.
We have more information available than ever even if critical thinking skills are in decline overall. Those who wish to create a better world tend to have more empathy or at least have the sense to know it is in their interests to consider how we live today will determine our future as a society.
The zeitgeist is driven by circumstance and to be 15-25 now is to be handed a turd sandwich by older generations. It should fire younger people up and I do hope there are going to be brilliant and thoughtful people who lead from Gen Z.
On the other hand, the empathy and future vision you're talking is often highly abstracted. Those moral frameworks in real life situations can often be highly reductive and absolutist. This too often leads to intractable stances with no ability to discuss and find common ground.
If you work with people under 25 you may have experienced this. Too often I've found they try to find insult in any interaction, are quick to judge and unable to compromise. This is the downside I've seen lately and I've had to manage it in real terms. It is an observation from my life whether it can be applied more broadly or not.
Generational observations aside, it is the times we're in that affects all age groups. Reductionist and absolutist rhetoric rules the day and the person who doesn't seek out knowledge will get swept away by simplistic rationales in the political realms in particular. This is true of people of all ages and political orientations these days.
It always was this way to some extent by dint of human nature, but the information deluge means those who seek knowledge and avail themselves of this are doing it amidst a sea of purposeful disinformation, lazy thinking and bad intentions. Information overload is something few humans manage well any longer.
Even well-intended people can be made dumb and callous by the world today if they don't learn to think for themselves. Being well-intentioned is simply not enough any longer whatever generation you belong to. I wish the next generations all the luck in the world, because the ones that preceded them did not care so much about the world they leave behind.