The Loneliest Generation

[Kahaih]

Please note that this article is dated September 2019:

https://www-psychologytoday-com.cdn...-matters/201909/why-millennials-are-so-lonely


If you find this topic interesting, read the article. It might surprise you.

 

[Kulindahr]

Watch a fussy toddler when his self absorbed parent gives him a cellphone and the child is immediately hypnotized. Not only is the parent taking the lazy way out of raising their child, they are destroying the natural creativity in the child's brain that is forming from very early in life. For example, read a novel and see how you have to use your imagination to picture a character the author is describing. Then watch a movie where you virtually turn off your brain and zone out. Parents used to read to their children, now they play cartoons for them on their tablets.

This reminds me of one Christmas-time shopping moment: I turned down the aisle with LEGOs, looking for something for my niece, and there was a lady looking mournfully at the kits on the shelves. I asked if she was okay, and she said her kids loved getting LEGOs as presents but all they ever did was build the kits and sit them on a shelf, which she hated because she wanted to encourage creativity.

I offered the solution I'd used with a cousin: buy a bundle of basic bricks, plus three different kits. Open the packages and dump all the pieces together in one box, and wrap that as a present -- and don't include any instructions! She stared at me for a moment then her eyebrows rose and she laughed, and said that was perfect. I helped her pick out five kits; she had three kids and decided to make them one big shared gift rather than a couple small ones each.

I did the same with presents for my niece: I knew she liked castles, so I bought LEGO castle kits, but I always threw in extra bricks and saved the instruction booklets for later -- in case she asked, though she never did. For every kit I got her, I also got sixty or seventy basic bricks, and she did her own castle designs.

 

[Peloso]

This reminds me of one Christmas-time shopping moment: I turned down the aisle with LEGOs, looking for something for my niece, and there was a lady looking mournfully at the kits on the shelves. I asked if she was okay, and she said her kids loved getting LEGOs as presents but all they ever did was build the kits and sit them on a shelf, which she hated because she wanted to encourage creativity.

I offered the solution I'd used with a cousin: buy a bundle of basic bricks, plus three different kits. Open the packages and dump all the pieces together in one box, and wrap that as a present -- and don't include any instructions! She stared at me for a moment then her eyebrows rose and she laughed, and said that was perfect. I helped her pick out five kits; she had three kids and decided to make them one big shared gift rather than a couple small ones each.

I did the same with presents for my niece: I knew she liked castles, so I bought LEGO castle kits, but I always threw in extra bricks and saved the instruction booklets for later -- in case she asked, though she never did. For every kit I got her, I also got sixty or seventy basic bricks, and she did her own castle designs.

Good for you. A deficit of creativity will not bode well for the future. Kids who are inherently creative are not likely to be deterred by the mind-numbing effects of technology, but most kids put their sense of creativity on the chopping block when they engage with social media and the internet. It's not just the arts that will suffer; creativity is a cornerstone of scientific research and to a certain extent, is needed to excel in just about every job you can think of.

Parents need to start thinking differently about how they introduce their kids to technology. The information overload of the eighties is turning into a disinformation overload. With mask/no mask mandates, the culture of school shootings and the furor of things like critical race theory, education has become overly politicized, and that's a bad enviornment for kids to be learning in.

Some of the blame should be shared by the Lego people themselves for creating kits with such rigid creative parameters, although having assembled hundreds of items from Ikea I sometimes wish I was better at following complicated but vague directions. It is my hope that your niece continues to play with Legos creatively, but I fear that as she develops socially, one day she'll be constructing her Lego kits with the sole purpose of showing her work on Instagram. So much of what people do or say or even think is motivated by the forethought of how it will appear on social media platforms. That's when you know you've lost your identity and exist solely to be Facebook's bitch.

Too often I see people going about their day to day lives and then BAM! their phone chirps and they stop everything and reach for it with the urgency one might use to put out a sudden fire. People walking down the street with their phones held out in front of them, staring at them, they look like they're being led by them. Actually, they are. All Hail the tech company overlords.

"My life is in my phone!" Must not be much of a life if you're subletting it to Samsung.