Day by day, I’m finding myself increasingly more frustrated by human behaviour. Is it me, or does it feel like general attitudes, courtesy and respect seem to be slipping across society?
I was having a good catch up with a friend the other day, and we were taking about this very subject. The world is a messy place right now, but it’s not necessarily any more or less messy than the past, it’s just messy in a different way. In a way humans haven’t experienced before. It’s a completely different place to 30 years ago, almost unrecognisable. Technology, connection, expansion, politics, rights, food, medicine, the list goes on…
Some of these things are AMAZING. Never in the history of mankind have we had the whole world at our fingertips. Never have we been able to have such an expansive view of the world, connect with different cultures and people, and find out almost any piece of information in an instant. Mind blowing, when you consider what the world was like when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s.
But on the other side of the coin, we’re exposed to so much more. We’re infiltrated so much more easily by the media, agendas and people’s general ignorances and judgements. There’s so much fear being spread throughout modern forms of media, it’s impossible not to be affected by it.
By having access and connection to the rest of the world, we’ve somehow become more insular. I’m noticing that community spirit is on the decline, people seem to be more out for themselves and less concerned about others. People are dividing themselves by views, opinions and political stances. People no longer ‘think’ - they just act, in this instantaneous world, usually to satisfy their own agenda. There just seems to be a general self-centredness to the modern human. Do you agree?
While my friend and I were putting the world to rights over coffee and cake, we’d started to explore the option that this could be an evolutionary thing. That the modern world is so different now, and it’s happened so quickly, that we’re having to navigate things in an entirely different and unknown way. That perhaps we’ve gone from the theme of “We are family” to the theme of “I will survive” over a very short space of time. Perhaps this is an evolutionary response to a rapidly changing modern world. What do you think?
Regardless, I reserve the right to be a grumpy old man about it!
We then got talking about the younger generations. I was in the school playground recently, waiting to collect my kids, and a couple of the grandparents were moaning about “kids these days…bring back the cane” <insert eye roll>
The problem here is, that it’s not the kids’ fault, teachers’ fault, or even the parents’ fault. Collectively, generations have changed. Kids don’t need more discipline. That’s not the answer. The cane worked when we had to train a nation to be ready to go to war at any given moment. When we needed to live in a command and control world for survival. But post WWII, it only took one generation to realise that we didn’t need to raise children this way anymore. That it isn’t conducive to raising healthy, well adjusted, secure children. But have we gone too far the other way?
My view is no, we haven’t. I do believe that kids need discipline and boundaries, but I also believe they need freedom and nurture. From a parenting perspective, it’s a very tricky balance to get right. And I definitely don’t get it right all the time.
My friend and I discussed that we think the real issue is the education system. Aside from the cane and a few other softer tweaks, it really is still operating as a Victorian system. Children are being taught things that aren’t relevant to the modern world, to the only world that they know, and will someday be governing. They’re being pressured into sitting still, doing as they’re told, getting good grades, doing homework and learning a bunch of stuff that isn’t useful in their real lives. It’s no wonder they’re frustrated, acting out, and acting self-centredly. They’re full of anxiety and are rebelling against a system that isn’t fit for modern children. They’re still being taught under command and control methods.
Why do they need to memorise useless information to pass a test, when in the real world, everything is available in the palms of their hands? We need to be teaching children emotional intelligence, critical thinking, conflict resolution, kindness and integrity, managing finances, healthy relationships, tolerance, empathy, as well as useful levels of maths, English, languages, technology and sciences. Not to mention arts and expression. But these life-essential soft skills tend to take a back-seat in favour of hitting academic metrics.
Now you might think “but it’s the parents responsibility to teach these things” - and there was a time, two or three generations ago, where you’d be right. When it was the norm to be able to raise a family with a single household income. And a stay-at-home parent would have time to contend with the every day pressures of raising children, running a household and educating their kids in these soft skills. But in today’s society, it’s near impossible to survive on a single income household. And for those single parents out there, hats off to you. I don’t know how anybody does it.
How does any parent earn a living, do the school run, keep their house together, feed their kids, help them with their homework, take them to their clubs, and get them to bed on time, and still have time for themselves? It’s an ever increasingly impossible task.
So back to my original sentiment, some days I hate people because I’m fucking exhausted, because they’re fucking exhausted, and we’re all just walking around in a cloud of overwhelm, with no capacity to think about anybody else. We’re simply all just trying to survive.
That’s the state of today’s modern world. Keep us all busy, exhausted and distracted, and we’ll create our own war.
Let’s face it, we do seem to be turning on each other at any given opportunity these days.
But here’s the great news…our kids are going to change everything. They’re totally different to any generation before them, they are our future. And the sooner we can embrace them and recognise them for their insane talents and totally different mindsets and skillsets to our generations, the sooner these archaic systems will fall, and the sooner the world will heal. The world is in transition right now, we’re all in survival mode, but good is all around us. It’s in the eyes and hearts of our children. Here’s to the next generation. Hopefully they’ll be less grumpy than me!
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