Originally Posted by
Cangooner
Seems to be a great deal of casting about for explanations - both simple and complex - for where we are as societies today.
IMHO, It goes way beyond fashion. While I'm in total agreement that something must be a bit wrong with anyone who reckons wearing one's pants around one's knees is a sensible thing to do, and that whoever came up with the absolutely flat baseball cap brim has some explaining to do, I also know that fashion is just fashion. It will change. It's also worth remembering that there is nothing new in this: peoples' clothes and how they wore them was put forward as one of the many sincere explanations offered by contemporaries for the onset of the Black death in the middle of the 14th century.
It goes beyond groupings of generations as well. I too am a Gen Xer, having arrived in the world smack dab in the middle of the 61-81 range given above. But what does that actually mean? I have a facebook account, but am well familiar with both outhouses and cook stoves. :) I now have a pretty cutting edge mobile phone, but hated my buddy's phone # when I was a kid because of all the 8s and 0s it contained. (if you don't get that, google rotary phone...) I grew up during the cold war, knew veterans of both World Wars, and sincerely hope we're not heading for round III. I treat everyone with respect until they show it to be undeserved. I don't feel the world owes me anything, and have worked damn hard for what I have earned.
I last taught at a university ten years ago, and back then we were starting to more regularly encounter students who (I think) embody many of the characteristics that are driving much of this thread. (sense of entitlement, lack of sense of personal responsibility, coddling parents, constant drive to be online/texting, etc) Some of them drove me nuts: not doing assignments and expecting there not to be any consequence; requests to completely restructure my carefully structured syllabus because they weren't "into" something in the course; calls/emails from parents asking to discuss their (adult) child's grades, etc., but to be honest it didn't take long to get them straightened out: after losing a letter grade or two, assignments started appearing on time; after being 'forced' into following the syllabus, students discovered new interests; and no, Mr. Smith, your child is an adult, so he/she can come talk to me about grades any time, but I cannot and will not discuss them with anyone else.
What *really* shocked me was how utterly unprepared many of them were for university and/or real life away from home. May of them couldn't write or make a cogent argument to save their life, but it went way beyond lack of academic skills. In fact the worst thing about my time as a lecturer was watching obviously bright students gradually fall apart during the first semester, then disappear after the Christmas break. So my question is what are doing - or not doing - before they get to the point where they are leaving home? Why are these young adults so utterly unprepared for the outside world, when they have all of it seemingly at their fingertips?
But then when I stop to think about it, I remember that these were not the majority. Most of my students were just fine: bright, smart, hard-working, self-reliant... all the things people say is absent from Gen Y. And these folks have gone on to start building careers as diverse as forest fire fighting, sports journalism, nursing, welding, and academia. So I'm pretty confident the generation isn't a write-off as a whole. :)
Much of this is very familiar, but while it's true that every generation has despaired for the ones to come in one way or other, there seems to be something deeper, more widespread, and just plain nastier going on these days. Declining capacity for critical thought and the echo chamber of social media and other online forums have much to answer for. But I also think the growing lack of empathy is just as worrying. It seems like more and more people are just unable to even imagine what the world looks like from another's perspective. And as long as that is the case, I fear hatred, division, bullying/trolling, will just get worse. Feed that back into the echo chamber, and it's hard to see things getting better any time soon. :(
Happy thoughts for Monday morning... Sorry for the rambling.
EDIT: apologies Bob for nudging this farther from your original post: I agree with your sentiment there
