Kids these days

I'm 45. Age is weird when you experience it from within. In some respects, I can feel everyone of my years. In others, I still think like a 20 year old.

For some reason, lately I keep hearing people really getting down on young people. I hear many common complaints, like: Kids today don't understand the value of hard work, their music is terrible, all they want to do is play video games. They said the same thing about us when I was that age, and I'm not going to bother looking up the ancient Greek quote by some philosopher or king or other important person where they are saying virtually the same complaints about 2500 years ago.

Old people always bag on young people. To be fair, it's quite clear that young people have plenty of complaints and jokes about older people. And many of the complaints, going both ways, are true when applied to particular people. Blanket stereotyping of any group of people is usually inaccurate and often insulting.

I keep thinking that "these kids these days" are going to be the ones taking care of these crotchety old people when they are drooling in their hospital gowns and have long since forgotten about all their complaints. They are going to be the few that are working to add to the Social Security pool when the many of the baby boom will be insisting that none of the benefits they were promised their whole life be cut. So let's be clear, the aged naggers better be mostly wrong about their complaints, and they better hope that there is no youth movement, rebelling against the almost certain high taxes that will be required to secure their benefits. I think of that when I listen to people complaining about youth.

I believe that young people today will have a better chance of playing catchup in the information age than any other generation previously. I've noticed myself that learning something new is easier, more convenient, and less expensive than ever before. I'm talking about the massive amount of courses and information that can be found online. Younger people are more comfortable with information technology than old people, a phenomenon that some call the digital divide. This is probably only going to accelerate. Current experiments with neural/computer interfaces center around allowing paralyzed people to move or communicate. While I can think of many reasons why it would be a bad idea to have a computer connection right in your brain, I can also see many advantages. Assuming that it won't be made illegal, who do you think is most likely to use this technology? Young people would embrace it while older people would reject it. If this computer access could be done inexpensively and without any serious problems, it would provide a huge advantage. Imagine being in a business negotiation with someone that could be checking records, compiling spreadsheets, and contacting your competitors while you are introducing yourself. The digital Grand Canyon. It would be the same as being confined to a wheelchair and getting in a foot race with a teen track star.

I was trying to explain that people usually recognize the value of knowledge later when they are away from school and out in the world. For some reason, this idea has usually been scoffed at when I bring it up. I don't know. The idea really can't be compiled as an overall statistic. It only matters on an individual basis. It doesn't take a large percentage of people to figure out the next cure for cancer, only a few. So only a few people need to "get it" to move science and society forward. I still believe if everyone cranked it up just a notch or two, that society overall would improve drastically. I've seen the movie Idiocracy, where people just keep getting dumber and dumber until society starts to fall apart. While it's easy to think and believe that this is the way things are going, I can't help but believe that we are heading in the opposite direction.