So here is another attempt to psychoanalyse young people that I don't understand:
I think their
lack of empathy is a problem because they grew up on social media where
everything (eg. top trending shit) is way over sensationalised and over
hyped. Either sensationally bad as in: "OMG my fave plant died!!!
😭😭😭😭💔☠️💔☠️💔☠️😭!!" or sensationalised good as in: "yay i have new
tat and it is GORGEOUS ,🕺😹💗💗💗 am literally CRYING rn!!"
The
end result of this endless, hyperbolisation is that when
someone comes up to them with a real a emotional situation - that isn't hyped and hashtagged on social media - they are Zen, just
like Pavlov's dog is when it is not being shocked to death by electrocution. That
is to say, they are emotionally dead, unresponsive, sneering "why
should i care?" beneath their Pinstagram ready mask.
And yet,
what will they be competent to do in an emergency if their capacity to feel /
explain what an emergency even is, simply does not exist without AI's helping hand to guide it?
When a person can only assess any phenomenon by such selfish criteria as "how big is the dopamine hit that this arrangement of letters and emojis incites in ME" then how genuine can their commitment to others ever really be?
Background to this Rant
Not a Boomer , here,
but a so called Gen X-er who mostly finds the whole under 50's
generation to be ultimately cold, and more interested in flexing what
their social media can do for them, or does to them, than living as
anything like a real, embodied human being. Like a person who can react
in real time and be genuine and empathise, based on any kind of
subjective experience of reality. It is a lack of experience, yes, but more
facts learned will never be able to rival that experience earned. Yet,
decades after some pundit first pointed this out, the majority of you /
us still seem fooled by the alleged power that this database of (faked
or fake-able) facts has to tell us the truth about anything. We know that it lies to us about the goings-on in our own cities, but we mindlessly believe whatever it says to us about foreign lands. In the language of the internet this makes me LMFAO 🤣
From Gaza
to geomagnetic activity, it's all just data without a brain that is "in the
game" of the action to interpret
it. And data lies. If you, the owner of a brain, refuse to participate first hand
in the realities that the data you feed into that brain are describing, then you are what we in the Gen X would call a
"poseur". "Braindead". You want to lecture anyone about Gaza? You go there and see it
for yourself and then come back here with the truth. YOUR truth.
But no, nooo, we can't do that. Too expensive. Everyone nowadays is constantly copping to the capitalist sensibilities by claiming "but learning online is easier / cheaper". Well, if that's the education you want, your views will always be cheap in the eyes of the world. Cheap and irrelevant. Rightly so. My own time in the Middle East showed me the difference between talking the talk and walking the walk.
And let's face it. The majority of people leaning on the internet for their views belong to the vast majority of people who only want what the herd wants. And deciding "what matters" to them personally is already too much work.
Without knowing "how" to be, any version of "what to be" quickly becomes irrelevant.
All The World Is A Stage
"Everything
is fake. Even that naked starving homeless person before me is some
sort of crisis actor." I have seen this bemused disdain etched on so
many young people's faces, both when I was housed and unhoused. People
in the social services department, and the far right and the clubbing
scenes left are united it donning it.
In Berlin, it's mostly
the underground stylee people that I see wearing this disdain
like an accessory. A rusted and secondhand medal of some sort of elitist
tradition, perhaps. Or at least, I notice it MORE in those sorts of
people. Because they used to constitute my chosen family, the
"anarchist" and "humanitarian" left. But then I fell on hard times and
realised that there really are two types of people in this world. The ones who
care about what's right. And the ones who care about what the herd thinks is right. And these two types exist in a 1-10 proportion in every
category, class, race, gender, orientation, etc, that exists.
It is depressing and
self destructive. Because it doesn't matter which side you're on or what clique you lean on.
Because, if current trends continue, all those detached and cynical faces will
soon be etched with want and need, themselves. The internet hyperbole of
emojis and hyperbile have desensititzed humanity to the things that bind
it together - such as its limited resources - and made us all agents
for everything that drives us apart. rhetoric, nitpicking, semantics,
one upmanship and so on.
Even the "Refugees welcome" brigade
seems to lack much genuine capacity for empathising with the confusing
mess of reasons why people are made into refugees, in the first place. Why? Simply put, the champions of that sticker brand seem
very uncomfortable with every undefined emotion and extreme that lies
oustide the limits of their internet self-referential spectrum. 'Cos
there's no emoji for "I've been human trafficked and my socioeconomic
reasons for not reasons for not reporting it are dense and opaque".
It
turns out that the internet does not know everything after all. And
that makes us idiots in every sphere that we allow it to govern for us.
Opinions?
That is my opinion anyway. Feel free to question it.
