Everywhere I look the world is getting worse. The next generation doesn’t look like it will be the answer…
-
Liberty Quote
- The unexamined life is not worth living.
— Socrates -
Pages
-
Recent Comments
ARCHIVES
- September 2024 (3)
- August 2024 (7)
- July 2024 (5)
- June 2024 (2)
- May 2024 (4)
- April 2024 (4)
- March 2024 (6)
- February 2024 (4)
- January 2024 (4)
- December 2023 (6)
- November 2023 (6)
- October 2023 (3)
- September 2023 (5)
- August 2023 (5)
- July 2023 (4)
- June 2023 (3)
- May 2023 (8)
- April 2023 (11)
- March 2023 (9)
- February 2023 (8)
- January 2023 (10)
- December 2022 (10)
- November 2022 (11)
- October 2022 (11)
- September 2022 (12)
- August 2022 (11)
- July 2022 (15)
- June 2022 (11)
- May 2022 (14)
- April 2022 (16)
- March 2022 (18)
- February 2022 (14)
- January 2022 (13)
- December 2021 (14)
- November 2021 (23)
- October 2021 (15)
- September 2021 (7)
- August 2021 (33)
- July 2021 (2)
Q. A painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety.
A. What is shame?
moderated
This is what we have let happen , we have bred narcissists with no values with their only aim in life is to make themselves feel good . Self Esteem rather than self acceptance , take on a cause that only requires you to be seen protesting for not actually give time and effort to actually help others .
There are the young who do volunteer , fortunately my off spring are hard working, and give time to community based activities supporting young people and you don’t see them on social media collecting likes and there are plenty like them but the others seek attention and approval so make the most noise. Jean Twenge et al did worldwide research a few years ago that indicated a rise in narcissism in the young with oldies still recording same level of narcissism as before however we are dying out. Still have Turubull and Rudd representing the 10% though .
Report comment
Even though my children believe the greenie mantra (propaganda all through school), they are all successful and only have successful friends. It saddens me they are not sceptical of social media, but just recently my daughter gave up faecesbook. One son uses it a lot for his business and it does generate a lot of custom. I have been a sceptic all my life, maybe more observant due to shyness.
Report comment
Excellent snapshot. So, on his advice, I googled something inspirational:
“Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out.”
― Robert Graves, I Claudius
Report comment
The narcissism of the young seem in part to be fed on the over attention that some grandparents wrap their grandchildren in. The “Princess” stuff as an example. Perhaps it’s happened because there are fewer children/grandchildren in some families so all the “eggs are in one basket” which creates a “specialness” tag. Whereas in earlier times grand children could number in the tens – and with that many, no-one is special.
Rising incomes and large homes with everyone having their own room, I don’t think has helped the situation: not having to share must encourage an expanded singularity of the ego. On top of that is the curated on-line life where every thought, action and occasion becomes a moment to savour through the lens of “your audience.”
There’s a great family movie that in part discusses the vacuousness of this stuff in the behaviour of one of the main characters. If you’ve not seen Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, it’s worth a look.
PS: Adam, hope things are starting to settle a bit for you all.
Report comment
Watch it burn, keep yourself safe, move into a mansion of your choice when they’ve all starved. Nature is on our side.
Report comment
The illusion of virtue-signalling.
It feelz so good ……….
Report comment
90%+ wymins to nobodies great surprise
Report comment
Universal literacy was the first mistake. Too many have no use for the ability beyond reading train timetables. Anything else gets mashed into a gloop to reinforc their prejudices. We see that with the expansion of university education for the intellectually limited. Ditto graphic literacy – do any of the million phone photos a day measure up to a small corner of a Dupain captured icon? They’re just momentary affectations, all those narcissistic digital nothings will be lost when their phone falls in the toilet or gets replaced with the latest “look-at-me” thingumy.
moderated
<blockquote>Rising incomes and large homes with everyone having their own room, I don’t think has helped the situation</blockquote>
The independence and freedom from serfdom provided by financial independence vastly outweighs the negatives, BBS.
one if the greatest travesties we currently have is a house is out of reach for most of these young people, and they don’t bother. Probably an input for this proliferation of perpetual childhood.
Report comment
Entropy, good correction and showing that by focusing on one thing only can skew a good(?) response/policy. The pandemic response from the government(s) in Australia and elsewhere has led to the sidelining of so many more/as important things as health.
Yes, rising incomes are not the problem. And your point about perpetual childhood – the no need to take/can’t take responsibility cohort. Though, young people can be mature and responsible but (really) only if they’re brought up that way.
Report comment
*than health
Report comment
Each generation in modern times enjoys a better standard of living, including in formerly impoverished nations, and this is a good thing.
With prosperity comes complacency and indulgence. It was ever thus.
However, this pandemic has certainly revealed fault lines in our resilience and in our ability to recognise signs of serious threats to liberty. It will be a decisive test for the future of democracy on this planet.
I don’t feel optimistic at the moment.
Report comment
You can’t build back better unless you break something first.
Report comment
Bazinga:
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
Report comment
Everyone here seems to be channeling Plato from beyond the veil.
How soon we forget what a literal mess, most of us were back when we were young, wet behind the ears & very hormonal & back then we could literally party all night & still get up at 7 am to play footy for at least the morning of the next day.
Does anyone still remember those days , even if its just by those tattoos?
I seem to recall being a total mess back then, with really bad life decisions & a lot of things I would rather do over if I possibly could…
As Plato put it back then……..
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise,” Greek philosopher (it’s not recorded whether he was standing on his lawn shaking his fist).
Despite the passing of more than 2,000 years his complaint sounds exactly like some modern oldster opining about the many faults of Millennials (including here on Inc.com).
In short, older folks have always lamented the sorry state of ‘kids these days,’ leaving behind a shockingly long and repetitive record of complaints. Which is kind of hilarious, but also perplexing. What is it exactly about middle age that seems to make people suddenly think the next generation is horrible compared to their own youthful foibles?
You might suspect it’s just that getting old makes you grumpy. And science shows it’s true that the grind of midlife does tend to cause a dip in happiness. But according to a fascinating new study out of the University of California, Santa Barbara highlighted in Discover Magazine, there’s another, more surprising reason we so often fall into complaining about ‘kids these days.’
You’re terrible at remembering yourself at 18.
The researchers kicked off their research the way you’d expect. They asked a random selection of adults to rate the intelligence, respect, and reading habits of today’s youth. It’s no surprise that respondents had about as positive things to say as Socrates. The kids are snotty and ill informed, the cantankerous adults claimed.
So far, so expected. But then the researchers did something clever. They also asked participants to rate themselves in these same traits. Were they big readers? Clever? Respectful of authority? When the researchers put the two sets of responses side by side a fascinating pattern emerged. The higher a person rated themselves on a particular measure, the lower they rated today’s youth.
“People that aren’t very intelligent or aren’t very well read or don’t respect authority, they tend not to think kids are so bad,” noted study co-author John Protzko.
Why? “First, we tend to judge others more harshly in areas where we excel. An ardent reader, then, will be more likely to deride someone else’s reading habits,” explains Discover’s Nathaniel Scharping. But second and more interestingly “our memories of what we were like as children can’t always be trusted.”
If you’re a dedicated bookworm now, it’s easy to forget that you barely cracked the assigned reading back in college. If you’ve learned over the decades to trust leaders, you might forget how rebellious you were back in the day. People, in other words, tend to use their current level of ability as a yardstick, forgetting exactly how much development it took them to reach their adult form.
“We are imposing our current self on the past,” says Protzko.
How not to become a grumpy old cliche
This subtle form of moving the goal posts, which causes us to judge young people by the same standards we judge far more experienced adults, is the root cause of our several thousand year history of bemoaning the horrible state of the youth.
That’s good news for young people who intuitively know their grumpy elders are amnesiac about the missteps and shortcomings of their own early years. You can now tell any adult who slags off your generation that they’re suffering from memory problems, and science proves it.
But the findings are also a useful reminder for those of us watching youth retreat in the rearview mirror. Our assessments of young people are almost certainly marred by our own faulty assessment of our own past character and abilities. Being aware of the bias might help us correct for it and avoid becoming the cliche of the grumpy oldster shaking her fist at “kids these days,” and missing out on benefiting from the talent and insights of the young.
moderated
That along with Covid Passports have brought us here –
Black Mirror – NOSEDIVE –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQS2LpmgmnM
The story revolves around Lacie Pound, a woman obsessed with her social media rating. We watch her spiral into a full blown mental breakdown as her plans to raise her rating gets waylaid by a series of unfortunate events.
Report comment
I just cant resist posting this
Talk about overly educated fools lacking any common sense, but even lacking the sense to knowing when to get out of the rain,………
you just have to laugh…….else you would weep for what must be coming down the track
Anyway, I was at a burial recently which, being limited to 10 mourners, while happened to be within 5.1 km radius of my residence as defined by my daily police state exercise regime , so it was still legal as long as it just was happenstance.
Anyway with that very same level of over educated, legal common sense, as exhibited by the said Justice Brett Kavanaugh below ,where a grandson of a 91 yr old woman who, being born in 1931 saw as child ,a Soviet Russian army going one way & then was followed 2 years later by a Nazi German army going the other way & then while being in a forced labour camp, saw a Soviet army going the other way & having a very recent PHD in Law from ANU, opined that the notion that we were in a state of war with the CCP was just TOTALLY ridiculous.
What is it with the Western hemisphere’s education system?
Blog/Corruption
Posted Oct 3, 2021 by Martin Armstrong
Video Player
00:00
06:22
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was fully vaccinated, has tested positive for COVID. Obviously, getting the vaccine does not prevent you from contracting COVID or spreading it.
There is something VERY VERY VERY wrong here. This is from the CDC’s website, which clearly has a section on the measles vaccine (MMR), warning that those who have these conditions should NOT be vaccinated.
Now here is the page from the CDC on the COVID vaccine. There is no section whatsoever to warn people who should NOT be vaccinated. Why? Once you have had a disease, you do not get vaccinated against that same disease. There is something seriously wrong here. Nobody will answer the questions, and you are to be fired if you refuse, and there are no exceptions. For every other vaccine, there are exceptions, but not with COVID. This is no longer medical; it is political. The burning question:
moderated
Loved his opening lines ‘where’s the police brutality when you need it?’
And enjoyed the band captain giving the selfie princess the heave ho around the corner.
Report comment
Contrasting the attention that parents give to their kids, these days, with my own upbringing.
It’s as if the most important people in the family are the kids, and the most important things that happen are the kids’ activities. 40-50 years ago, work was always more important than kids’ sports…. for our parents, anyway.
No wonder kids are narcissistic.
You can’t raise kids who will reach their full potential by giving it all to them. They have to learn to create their own opportunities. You won’t raise kids to have successful family lives if they don’t learn how to put someone else first, or to regard their husband/wife as more than just a partner in the kid-raising business.
moderated
It seems to me that there are many on catallaxy that seem to think they are watching the world from somewhere else.
You don’t get to watch it burn .
You go down in flames as well.
Report comment
I see telling lies at Dover’s isn’t enough for some people I’m sure
Report comment
There are enough of us around to hang in there Adam, perhaps we would do well to remember the words of SOCRATES;
“He is a man of courage who does not run away, but remains at his post and fights against the enemy”
“Smart people learn from everything and everyone, average people from their experiences, stupid people already have all the answers”
Tough call in our present situation, I do however believe we will win out.
Report comment
My wife is in a powered wheelchair.I was walking with her.At the end of our street is a cafe.Usual lot of 30 -40 somethings waiting for coffee and blocking the path.
Blondie looks around sees my wife.Looks back and doesn’t move.Basically forces my wife onto the nature strip.
She was lucky I wasnt driving the chair.
Report comment
make sure you have a comfortable bed
Report comment