We’re all growing up with weirdos that we now know of…
Historically, people grew up and were raised among a very small circle of people/community. Over the course of their lives people would interact impactfully with far fewer people than people do today. This is as a result of the explosion of social media, a preference and priority among young people to buy experiences through travel. The inexpensive and relatively non-cumbersome methods by which we can travel. Access to resources that allow us to travel, and access to so much information.
We live in unprecedented times in that everything we do is provoked by far greater precipitous influences than humans have had access to any time in history. Even this pandemic, given the immediacy of information sharing that is available to such wide volumes of people changes how to respond to and react to and mitigate such emergencies. (More about this in another article)
As a young 30 something year old, I can’t help but occasionally feel the despair the world seems to thrust on my generation. I graduated university (in 2009) during an unprecedented economic downturn (2008 Crash), which influenced my career choice, and many among my cohort, who despite being highly educated, were not afforded the opportunity to utilize their skills as they ought to have been. In a world where materialistic success, and the need to buy stuff to live, dominates, people cannot live in centers of influence such as big cities and make a living enough to sustain living in these cities.
I introduced all the above to note, that I know of these shared experiences because of social media, and the sheer number of articles whose authors describe their lives, or their experiences, which logically means there are people whose experiences must be the same.
I will digress for a second, when I sometimes think about the last century, and my connection to it (my grandparents are still alive and they survived the Holocaust, and WW2), through listening to live account about what life was like in the 1920s-until the 1980s when I was born, I am fascinated that events like WW1 and WW2 took place, or the Holocaust, or that humans murder each other. (This is not meant to be an idealistic article). What I am most fascinated by is the fact there was an influential human, most likely my age who was at the helm of whatever dramatic event was taking place. There were young mission-oriented leaders who were fighting for something that was meaningful to them and their compatriots. There was no apathy, or distractions, there was the perpetuation of a mission, albeit during WW2, a terrible one.
Where are our fearsome leaders, where are the humans who are achieving great things, and not just material success? I am not talking about radical people who will try to harm other humans, but people who are working for a mission beyond themselves. Obviously, they exist, and there are many heroes in our world. I am asking this rhetorically to bring out my next point. It seems like we are growing up around wusses. It seems like my generation likes to complain and be a victim, and in that way they can be heroic. Why do I feel this way? Of course, we can blame external factors as to why our lives are the way they are, but what about personal responsibility? What if just aren’t as great as we think we are?
There doesn’t seem to be someone from the generation ahead of us who is showing us the way. Because as humans we crave direction. Our earliest experiences are ones of us making sense of a chaotic world. That’s what human development is. (More articles on this at a different time). Part of why we are born without any skills is because as conscious (human defined) thinking animals, we have the power to artificially steer how our lives will end up. People who are older than us have the power to influence us in a plethora of ways. Human babies crave a type of development that is healthy and achieves balanced individuals (balanced in that their personality can cope with external triggers of the world) while it is supported through evidence that there are many cases of human children being raised in detrimental backgrounds and turning into monsters. Our entire human code of law and moral compass is predicated on humans being in control of themselves, such that they know right from wrong. But what is right from wrong if there is a vicissitude of explanations justifying why a person is right or wrong (I mean OJ Simpson was acquitted of murder charges because of a technicality).
Our leadership has failed us, or at the very least we have the audacity to contradict and push back in a way historically unfounded. So our generation is stuck in a forest, waiting for a beacon of light and hope to show us the way. But it never comes, so we turn to our neighbors who are in the same forest as us and we try to get through this together. We are “adulting” together, without a proverbial “parent” in the room to tell us what to do.
As children, and in the case where we have parents, or guidance, or moral compass teaching us what to do, it tends to come from people who are a little older than us, who can teach us right from wrong- or so we think. Then we become teenagers, just old enough to be thinking more complexly from our childhood, and we begin asking questions and shun the system, with the same maturity of a child (an angsty mix). But we become older and search for more and more answers. We either get them by engaging in risqué behaviours, having traumatic experiences, creating narratives and complexes around social norms we either love or hate or love to hate. (I am obviously simplifying things here, the list can go on and the interconnectivity and complexity of the human experience is far more vast than the colloquialisms I am adopting to keep things simple – you get the point.)
But the void isn’t filled, now were are just a bit older than we were, and presumably more mature that we were, or so we think, but without the leadership we crave, as we have thrown them out with the bathwater. So we turn to ourselves, and our fellow cohort, and what do we see, a bunch of fuckin’ weirdos. So we are leaderless and empty. What fun.