Lazy Youth of today

This is a great satyr about today's youth.

As I grow older I begin to see how nightmarish our generation must have looked - atheist, cynical, individualist, raised by the media, in love with computers. Between all the goths, punks, skin-heads, environmentalists, and militarists I almost see GenX as a fascist generation.

That's the environment we were raised in - the year I was born, was the year that the US was kicked out of Vietnam. Just like the Germany after the loss of WWI, America handled their defeat by a burst of sadistic macho sulking. Now add in the Reagan Revolution, Thatcherite austerity, The War on Drugs, AIDs, Chernobyl, Valdez crash. I was 14 when the Soviet Union fell. The biggest change was that now the corporation media were raising us - if the old hate the young and the young hate the old then corporations will be our surrogate parents.

Human brains take a long time to boot-up (ie childhood) because they are so adaptable. We can survive in the desert or arctic, we can believe in Pentecostalism or Socialism, we can see the worst family behaviours as normal. There is a basic 'ape' inside us that isn't so culturally determined but our evolutionary advantage is our adaptable 'neural plasticity'.

If you raise a generation to eat excrement and they will call it 'food'.

Imagine being born in mid-1990s and having the 'Wars of Terror' as your childhood, the trials of adolescence conducted publicly through Facebook and the 2008 Stock-Market meltdown as your graduation present?

Teaching is a job where you work at the fountain of youth, every year the students are the same age, it's unnatural. Every year the devil comes with the same offer, "Why don't you just hate these shallow, twittering, right-wing, corporate-obsessed fuck-ups?" The first answer is easy: "This is MY class, these are MY students - as long as I'm in charge for the next hour and fifteen minutes anyone that wants to harm these kids has to go through me first."

The second answer is much harder: "My god - what must have we looked like at that age?"

Also here is a great satyr (actually two) around a GenX youth:

To be honest.... From my first-hand experience in high school (Which I might add was not too long ago) the thing that my generation lacks, simply put is purpose. The lower middle class that makes up the most of our Western youth neither has the struggle to survive, as is common for the poor demographic, neither does it have the expectations to become a business owner or a scientist or a doctor that is Bred into the higher class of society. We are stuck in the purgatory of the immediate. We view the world as what is directly in front of us, school, friends, Facebook and of course the shallow Meaningless love That my generation so desperately craves and then throws away in a month or two.

For us, government decisions, taxes and wars across the sea mean very little to us unless it's pushed in our faces. We are quite content to slowly live out our lives working minimum wage and spending our meager earnings on booze, junk food And social life. Society expects very little from us, in fact they give us very little to do in the first place, The next five or 10 years is Going to be real hard on my generation, full-time minimum wage can no longer sustain a single person and college diplomas mean less every year....

At least that's my take on the situation, also the generation I'm referring to is generally from 14 to 19

To be honest, Seth, that was much the same situation that Gen-X faced. We all live in the shadow of the Baby-Boomers and in some weird meaningless consumer society where we are encouraged NOT to become involved in politics or reform.

One difference is that even through both our childhoods took place during conservative revivals (Reagan Revolution & War of Terror), my generation was still closer to the liberal ideals of the 1930s and 1970s, ideals that have grown shadow thin at this point.

And then there is the technology. The first-time I was on a USENET group was in my first year at Carleton. I suspect the mass presence of the internet, facebook, smartphones has changed a lot - even if the post-consumerism landscape of ennui and meaninglessness is the same.

Even though I didn't realize it at the time the period of the 1990s was an era of optimism. I don't know if your early adulthood will have anything similar or if an other great recession/depression lies ahead, but whatever lies in the near future we will be in it together: Watching the Baby-Boomers finally facing Grim-Reaper! It should be interesting.