By Paolo von Schirach
May 12, 2013
WASHINGTON – TIME magazine just provided a rather depressing portrait of today’s young people: narcissists, inflated egos, inflated expectations, dreams of easy careers with easy fame and very little effort. Going deeper, it is a rather scary picture of people whose idea of meaningful human interactions is obsessive texting and collecting virtual “friends” on social media.
Pulverized information
They live in a universe of pulverized bits of information. A world in which it is not considered relevant to go any deeper than the minimal space allowed in a tweet. A world in which there is no effort to create context and to seek the root of anything through serious studying.
Old fashioned culture was no panacea
Mind you, while the old world forced human beings to absorb knowledge slowly, bit by bit, that modality was no guarantee that people would focus properly and generate good, positive ideas. Karl Marx was a scholar. He studied a lot. He wrote a lot. And he created a monster that he called “scientific socialism”. And this monster became the bible of millions of misguided people, included plenty of crack pots, (think of Mao and Pol Pot) who after long and hard research came to believe in all that colossal nonsense of the Millennium-like salvation that would be brought about by the cleansing proletarian revolution that would finally put and end to exploitation. So, old fashioned “study” in dusty libraries is no guarantee of optimal, or even decent, results.
Inflated expectations
That said, these self-involved kids who surf a lot an read nothing grow up with disconnected fragments of knowledge that amount to nothing. The TIME Magazine story talks about inflated professional expectations. It talks about an entitlement frame of mind whereby easy careers and promotions must come as a matter of course.
The economy will end the dreams
Well, old fashioned economics will take care of that. These kids are coming of age in the fiercely competitive global economy. Some of them, no doubt, have the smarts to get ahead. But all those who expect things to just “happen” because this is what they want, are in for a very, very rude awakening. Unless they have proven marketable skills and a “good attitude” towards work, they are likely to spend many more years in their parents’ basements, texting to each other.