I was out with a couple ex-colleagues (still friends) the other night for a drink and a chat and we spoke a fair bit about parenting, parenting styles, the breakdown of multi-generational households and why so many people these days don't have children. And the lack of children just makes it all worse, because many people don't grow up around children, which increases the mental and emotional barriers to having children. And in my opinion, the breakdown in society has been further catalysed by all kinds of other factors that we have adopted, without thinking too much of the repercussions.
Well, many of us haven't thought about it.
For instance, my friend was saying how the uptake in mobile phones in Finland was very high and just about every child by the age of seven had one - and it was seen as a good thing. It was "embracing technology" and facilitating "digital natives" and all of that. But that opinion has changed now, as the dangers have become apparent. And then he used the words...
How could we know?
He assumed that everyone accepted this opinion because everyone he knew accepted it, however - that is not actually the case. At the time smart phones were introduced and people started pushing them to their kids, I was already talking about the dangers that are so apparent now, because it is very predictable due to the fact that we are human.
While everyone believes themselves to be a unique little snowflake, being human means that we have far more in common than we have different, and when we are looking at individual aspects based on averages, we are predominantly average. We might be better in some things, or incapable in others, but when it comes to the way we mostly function, there is little to differentiate us. We all need to eat, sleep and defecate.
Moreover, we are nearly all driven by the same basic needs and desires, as well as influenced by the same incentives. We are highly predictable, which is why the algorithms that push our behaviours are so effective. If we weren't predictable, the algorithms wouldn't be able to group and align us, as pushing what we want, when we want it becomes impossible.
We are predictably lazy.
We are lazy movers. We are lazy thinkers. Moving and thinking takes energy and because energy was hard to come by, we have evolved to conserve it where we can. We look to find easier ways to do things, and we create patterns of thought so we don't have to continually solve problems or pay attention. But, while we are lazy, we are incredibly good at finding ways not to do things - and once we have a pattern of not doing, we settle right in.
In the modern world, this translates into us increasingly becoming consumers, where we are able to feel part of something, feel knowledgeable, even when we have zero practical skill in that area. It wasn't that long ago that people with zero practical skill, were useless. But perhaps, that is still the case, it is just that we are yet to fully comprehend or acknowledge how irrelevant we are making ourselves.
There is a term called "competitive cognitive artifacts" which describes tools that make a task easier, but in so doing reduces our own ability to do the task. An easy example is a calculator used instead of the brain. The more the tools are applied, the less skill we develop and as I believe it, the more we degrade. But when it is applied to children, they don't degrade, they never develop the cognitive ability to do something in the first place. And again as I believe, this means they do not build the physical brain structures required for skills they might require in the future, like critical thinking and problem-solving ability.
But it isn't just the physical tools like calculators and screens that we have used to babysit our children, it is all the social and cultural tools also, where our habits have changed in the way we raise our children. We protect them by taking bullies out of schools, having teachers solve playground problems, cover equipment in rubber, put on knee and elbow pads and essentially wrap them in cottonwool, physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Is it any wonder they are so anxious and depressed?
If a person will be so scared of looking silly making a mistake filling up their car that they would rather run out of petrol, or so scared of answering the phone that they will not get a job - is it any wonder that they would be scared of being a parent? Being a parent is scary because a parent has to take responsibility for another person's life. They have to provide and care for, do a lot of gross things and be frightened whenever their child is at risk - which is always!!!
But what we have done as a society is keep on introducing ways to make our lives "easier" without looking into the future of what an easy life leads to. Easy paths do not teach the skills required that are needed to reach potential and they do not build the cognitive and emotional capabilities to face challenge. What they do is make one soft and whenever even the dullest corner gets brushed, it hurts.
All of the tools we have created could be used for lots of good, but ultimately us being human means, most of the time they won't be. Instead, we will use the tools to make our lives easier, to do things faster, to avoid having to learn skills - because that is how we have evolved to behave. Put a kid on a computer and they don't automatically start learning to code, and someone on Instagram doesn't automatically start building a career. Because, that is not the way we behave on average.
And averages matter.
Because no matter how different you think you are, you are predominantly average.
Like me.
Taraz
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I would dearly love an easy life where I can just do what I want for a change XD
I like making things hard for myself even when I don't though
For whatever reason this made me remember one of the 3d units that I did back at uni where they made us write the graphics code for everything that we would normally do in [3d program of choice, the uni used Lightwave3D] "just to see what it's like". I guess it would be useful for some of the people that were intending on going into games as coders eventually but for the rest of us it freaking sucked. We were all getting so frustrated having to type and test and taking literal weeks and weeks and weeks to do the same thing that would have taken minutes in [3d proigram of choice]. It felt like (and or most of us, it was) an incredible waste of time. I know some of my friends cheated and used a 3d app and I will admit I was very sorely tempted myself x_x
Which I guess leads on to there's a lot of things where the tool makes the job easier but won't help you if you don't have at least the base level skill to use it.
Yes. But then, the easy life people are largely having is leading them to doing what others want :D
It was the same for me at uni with writing a webpage in html - when there were programs to do it already. What a waste of time and resources.
I started out on Dreamweaver back in the day!
I don't actually remember why I chose to start hand coding but I do remember finding out that Dreamweaver at the time heavily bloated the code after that.
and then I became a webmonkey for a while
Definitely not much point otherwise unless you want to do it as a job or have an actual interest in it.
Most people can't even take responsibility for their own lives, so maybe it's not that bad that they're not trying to become parents. Though most still do, anyway, or maybe because of it. They're not aware enough of their irresponsibility, so they don't care.
Yes, but why are people so incapable to look after themselves these days?
Partially for the reasons you state above :-D It's not necessary anymore to be auto-responsible, technology and society take care of too much.
Well, coding skills are no longer needed, human coders are obsolete. Humans can no longer compete with AI when it comes to writing code, it is over.
Just 15 years ago everyone was told "become a coder" and then when self-driving cars were starting, they said that the taxi drivers could start to be coders - as if that was a possibility for them. I suspect that a lot of physical jobs are going to be replaced in the next decade too.
I think the hardest thing is not being average.However, if we want growth, it begins when we are willing to expect a little more from ourselves and from life.
Even the non-average people in one or two areas, are average in a thousand other areas. We are all pretty the same.
Your insight into 'competitive cognitive artifacts' hits right at the core of modern fragility. By trying to engineer a pain-free, frictionless childhood, we haven't protected the next generation—we've systematically starved them of the resistance required to build emotional and cognitive muscle
Precisely. And we are all going to pay the cost for generations to come.
I think one of the biggest challenges today is that many people depend too much on technology for even simple things. Technology is helpful, but I believe we still need to learn basic life skills and solve problems on our own.
Basic life skills seem to have been replaced by passive entertainment consumption.
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STOPI was always against smartphones for kids, but I had quite different reasons. The other reasons are pretty clear now, but personally I think a piece of equipment that expensive and fragile is just too big of a responsibility for most kids that age. They are still learning and growing. Then you add on all the other reasons and it just doesn't make sense to give them one.
Thanks