Smallsteps rushed inside in the the evening, carrying a five-leaf clover. And then literally two minutes later, she comes in with a four-leaf clover. She has found dozens of them over the last years - including an eight-leaf clover. I don't know how she does it. Hopefully, all this collected luck provides a return when she is closer to adulthood.
Don't rely on luck to get you through.
Your
/jɔː,jʊə/
determiner
Belonging to or associated with the person or people that the speaker is addressing.
You're
/jʊə/
contraction
You are.
For those worried I had succumbed to poor grammar in the title.
I was talking with a client yesterday as he was driving back from a site visit to one of his customers, and we held the session anyway. It is good like that at times, because the conversation is a little different than if he is sitting in his office. And this time, we ended up talking a lot about the changes in culture for the young (he has two kids who are in university) and the impacts it is having on their quality of life.
As I have said many times and quite recently, I believe that a lot of the personal challenges the young face today, like anxiety, depression, and loneliness, are "self-inflicted" through their habits. However, those habits are conditioned behaviours driven by consumerism, which they didn't choose themselves. At least initially.
But we got onto a conversation about "having the answers" and how back in the day it was required to show your working in maths. He is an engineer, so I used this as an example. However, the people who have grown up with a smartphone in their hand, have always had the answers available to them, and all they had to do was ask the right question. This answer makes them feel like they have learned, but all they have learned is the answer.
42.
Right?
The problem with only having the answer, is that it is impossible to validate without knowing how to do the working, but many have been spending a large part of their time searching. And I gave another example and asked when he sits down to watch a movie with his kids and there is an actor that they can't place, what do they do? And predictably, they google the answer.
Now, that is a low-value situation, but it is indicative of their thinking process, where instead of wracking their brains to search for links and memories to provide an answer, they go right to the end. Having the answer always available, robs them of the ability to critically think and process their thoughts, reducing their ability to problem solve.
Lucky there are no problems in the world now.
Lucky.
We are lucky to live in a time when we have the most amount of information available to us ever, right at our fingertips. And while it can be hard to know fact from fiction, the fact is that most people aren't actually using the information they can access to improve themselves or others. Instead, the majority of the time is spent on being passively entertained.
Work ethic?
Tonight my wife had friends over for dinner, while I was out with Smallsteps. And when we returned, we sat down with them for a bit. One (all of them are old friends of mine too) was saying how a "girl" she manages still has her phone bill paid by her father. This girl is thirty years of age and a professional. And this isn't uncommon, with people in their late twenties and early thirties, relying on their parents for all kinds of things including groceries and rent, whilst still going on overseas holidays.
The generation of living beyond means.
They take an "only young once" approach as an excuse to spend everything plus more, without acknowledging that thirty years of age is no longer young. Sure, it isn't old, but it was only a generation or two ago that thirty was a decade into a career, with two or three children. Shirking responsibilities at thirty is just poor behaviour. And this is especially true considering what opportunity people have available to self-study to be able to do a myriad of things at a higher level. This opportunity wasn't available to the parents, yet are the kids doing better?
No.
Because rather than self-educating to improve results using the tools available, they are just entertaining themselves like children in a playground, rocking back and forth in a swing - getting nowhere. At least as a kid the games are foundational and can be used to build upon. But still playing the same games as an adult doesn't bring anything additional to the table. It just spends time.
Many keep saying that the younger generations are doing great things, but I don't see it through my daily life experience. Do you? And I don't mean on the internet - I mean as you walk through the world and interact with them, and those they interact with.
They are just living life with different priorities.
I hope they found a lot of four-leaf clovers for when they are in their fifties, and still have half a life ahead of them. Because they don't seem to be doing the work necessary to take care of themselves.
Feeling lucky?
Taraz
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