Yet again, an excellent piece. First, I want you to know just how much I value your work and how frequently I use it in my own teachings, presentations, supervision, and counseling sessions. Thank you.
My opinion is that causality can also be ascribed to the sharp, yet not novel, rise in postmodern deconstructionism being taught across colleges and universities. Those students have younger siblings, and the graduates of those insitutions across the past 12-15 years (when it really exploded) have found jobs in K-12 education and corporate America, influencing yet more young minds.
When young people are taught that literally nothing is real, everything is merely a construct of a construct built by oneself (or others), and that well anchored ideas and beliefs are not merely uncommon but in some cases harmful or hateful, that leaves them disillusioned and unpassionate, verging on nihilism. They have no mooring from which to view the world, no stable sense of identity from which to form opinions. Their lens is constantly refracting based on what they think others expect of them, which itself is constantly changing.
Life has become a house of mirrors for this generation, and because they have no anchor point, they have no place from which to assert themselves, take a stand, and stop reflexively reacting to the latest stimulus. As such, this current generation has gone adrift in its own echo chamber of self-inflicted lethargy. And because it has been taught only to tear down and reject - never to build - any efforts to realign based on reason or truth are wholly rebuffed, thus perpetuating the feedback loop of disconnection and misery.
This is why your work, along with Jonathan Haidt, Zach Rausch, Lenore Skenazy, Bari Weiss, Jordan Peterson, and many others is so, so important. It offers a path out of this psychological dystopia. Keep it up please, we need you!
Very interesting -- this definitely provides a perspective on Gen Z's pessimism, that they have been taught to reject so many things but have not been given viable replacements. Here, it's let's reject work. But what replaces that? Doing nothing and then not being able to pay rent? Or perhaps that's too extreme and what they are really saying is we need a better way of working that is more humane. Negativity can be good if it leads to constructive change -- but if it's just nihilism, not so much.
I think we underestimate the gig economy(ies) of Door Dash, Uber, Uber Eats, and yes, Only Fans. In a nutshell, the robust western economy has afforded this level of privilege (nay, entitlement?) and this current generation has never not known instant gratification. I still remember the card catalog, e.g., but those born after 1990ish don't even remember a world pre-internet or pre-DollarTree.
When the inevitable recession hits and all that disposable income evaporates were going to see the work ethic re-emerge put of sheer desperation. But will anyone be hiring?
To quote the late, great Buckminster Fuller, who said this back in 1970:
"We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
Yet again, an excellent piece. First, I want you to know just how much I value your work and how frequently I use it in my own teachings, presentations, supervision, and counseling sessions. Thank you.
My opinion is that causality can also be ascribed to the sharp, yet not novel, rise in postmodern deconstructionism being taught across colleges and universities. Those students have younger siblings, and the graduates of those insitutions across the past 12-15 years (when it really exploded) have found jobs in K-12 education and corporate America, influencing yet more young minds.
When young people are taught that literally nothing is real, everything is merely a construct of a construct built by oneself (or others), and that well anchored ideas and beliefs are not merely uncommon but in some cases harmful or hateful, that leaves them disillusioned and unpassionate, verging on nihilism. They have no mooring from which to view the world, no stable sense of identity from which to form opinions. Their lens is constantly refracting based on what they think others expect of them, which itself is constantly changing.
Life has become a house of mirrors for this generation, and because they have no anchor point, they have no place from which to assert themselves, take a stand, and stop reflexively reacting to the latest stimulus. As such, this current generation has gone adrift in its own echo chamber of self-inflicted lethargy. And because it has been taught only to tear down and reject - never to build - any efforts to realign based on reason or truth are wholly rebuffed, thus perpetuating the feedback loop of disconnection and misery.
This is why your work, along with Jonathan Haidt, Zach Rausch, Lenore Skenazy, Bari Weiss, Jordan Peterson, and many others is so, so important. It offers a path out of this psychological dystopia. Keep it up please, we need you!
Very interesting -- this definitely provides a perspective on Gen Z's pessimism, that they have been taught to reject so many things but have not been given viable replacements. Here, it's let's reject work. But what replaces that? Doing nothing and then not being able to pay rent? Or perhaps that's too extreme and what they are really saying is we need a better way of working that is more humane. Negativity can be good if it leads to constructive change -- but if it's just nihilism, not so much.
I think we underestimate the gig economy(ies) of Door Dash, Uber, Uber Eats, and yes, Only Fans. In a nutshell, the robust western economy has afforded this level of privilege (nay, entitlement?) and this current generation has never not known instant gratification. I still remember the card catalog, e.g., but those born after 1990ish don't even remember a world pre-internet or pre-DollarTree.
When the inevitable recession hits and all that disposable income evaporates were going to see the work ethic re-emerge put of sheer desperation. But will anyone be hiring?
To quote the late, great Buckminster Fuller, who said this back in 1970:
"We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."