In my lifetime, I’ve never seen a wider generation gap than the widening void between the young and the old today.
We’ve always known that the young have the energy to build a culture and society and make a civilization secure and healthy. Very few people understand the technologies that the young are using now, from AI to TikTok and too many gaming sites to count or list.
During meaningful social change, the important thing is to make everyone part of the change. But we live in a world where most of the country doesn’t know about change, let alone how to join in. And most politicians seem to want nothing to do with rationality or understanding.
For much of recent history, it was accepted that older people have the wisdom and life experience to guide the young to rule society and civilization and guide humans through the darker and more troubling spots of human evolution and development.
Those understands have been shattered. The next generation has grown up with computers, tech medicine, robotics, computerized drone wares, AI, gaming, and thousands of high-tech sites and gathering places beyond the understanding of the vast majority of older people.
As usual, the old farts who seem to run our state legislatures and Congress are getting hysterical about the impact of games and sites like TikTok and X. Their idea is to ban it and exploits all the fear and confusion it has created.
I wonder if anyone in America is interested in talking to other people in America, especially the young, who are now living in a different world.
YouTube tops the 2022 teen online landscape among the platforms surveyed. It is used by 95% of teens. TikTok is next on the list of platforms that were asked about in a recent survey (67%), followed by Instagram, Habbo, Snatch, Facebook and Snapchat, Vine, Tumblr, X, Pinterest, and Yahoo, all of which are used by about six in ten teens.
There are literally hundreds more popular digital gathering sites, but few people over 30 have heard of most of them, including me.
Several state legislatures hope to curb or ban many of these sites. Parents are bewildered and afraid. Their children are becoming strangers. Politicians are doing everything possible to make the chasm worse by exploiting it.
Last month, Montana officially became the first state to ban TikTok altogether, a law believed to be both foolish and unenforceable. We seem never to learn that the answer to societal issues isn’t just to deny things but to understand why so many young people are drawn to them.
Montana’s law had teenagers laughing all over the country. Banning TikTok will never happen in that way; there aren’t enough police officers to enforce it. I can hear the kids laughing. I don’t pretend to keep up with what teenagers know and say. People my age seem foolish when they try to talk tech, and it’s almost impossible for older brains to really grasp it. I’d rather understand it than pretend I’m in it. I don’t make a persuasive teenager.
My therapy dog’s work with Zinnia in various schools taught me that this generation defines life differently than older generations. Wisdom has always been seen as the cornerstone of age.
Today, wisdom and knowledge are in contention, and understanding is falling far behind on both sides.
It seems that wisdom and knowledge – ideas like truth and empathy, understanding a vision or a policy, or what is possible, or how to treat others – are failing.
Without both, it is starting to feel like we are all bound to fail in critical ways – telling the truth, peace, fighting for democracy, forming communities, talking with each other civilly – are collapsing.
The Judeo-Christian culture promoted family, fidelity, honesty, community, and charity.
I grew up with these values, but they are not the values of the young anymore. And I can’t really say what those values are. I don’t know.
This schism is helping to tear our culture apart. The young are contemptuous of the people in charge, most of whom can’t comprehend their passions, actions, and feelings. Change is always difficult and always inevitable.
The helpful question is how to handle it.
Older people feel abandoned, ignored, and left out of the cultural and technical changes. Only people 30 and under seem to have the energy, experience, and instincts to grasp the details of the tech future.
Money, the environment, and artistic and cultural freedom are the issues I hear about.
Everywhere I go, I hear people complaining about how new technologies are ruining the young, making them almost illiterate and socially inept and dumbing them down.
That is a foolish way to try and understand a generation that will have to try to save the world for the rest of us.
The truth is this: we are all ignorant of knowing and understanding the others. That gap can ruin us all. When we alienate ourselves from the young, we isolate ourselves. I learn a lot from young people whenever I talk with them.
Against all of this is money and cost, the driving force behind the government and the corporate world. That is not the driving force of the young.
That is a considerable value problem for young and old: “Earth provides enough to satisfy everyone’s needs but not everyone’s greed,” said Gandhi.
This disruption of old values and ideas harms the young and the old. Teachers tell me they do not understand things like gaming and TikTok. Their students are not very interested in the things they are teaching them. School is mainly seen as a boring and irrelevant intrusion. Kids tell me their parents and teachers have no understanding of their culture or their lives.
“They just want us to be anything but us.” one senior told me. “They want us to be them.”
My idea is to respect what the kids I meet are doing. I am curious about the new culture; I want to know more about it, but I know I will not understand most.
But I never want to pretend I know as much as they do. Speaking to some high school students recently, I was asked (by the teacher) what I felt about the vast schism that has opened up in the growing struggle between knowledge and wisdom.
I thought the best idea was to learn to listen and respect each other rather than ban or demonize each other.
Older people have learned a lot of valuable lessons about how to live, and younger people control our future and perhaps even our democracy.
I’m not sure, I said, that human communities can be built around computers or AI.
But it’s also true that without computers and technological advances, the idea of a global community can never happen.
Computers help inspire people, but they also isolate and divide them and have undermined ideas like truth, education, and listening.
I told the kids that young people seem to be losing the ability to communicate verbally, but they tell me they communicate with each other all the time, just not in the old days.
They have a point. I do not accept the notion that young people are dumber than more senior people or that they have no values. We just have not done the hard work of explaining and speaking with them, rather than wringing our hands in the old-fashioned way: young people are not as worthy as we are.
This, I think, is horseshit, a way of looking at the young and clucking. It has never worked..
I told them that from where I sit, the problem is that we, as a culture, forget how to listen or speak to one another. How can we possibly understand each other in that way?
I believe that knowledge and wisdom are equally important, the one helping us be healthy and prosper, the other about how to live safely and wisely. Older people can help younger people know how to live. Younger people can help older people understand the new world we are living in.
In my life, no generation has been as isolated and known more than the one coming up now.
I knew few older adults who knew how social media works beyond the demonization old farts and ignorant politicians insist on giving it.
And I’ve met a few young people who can verbalize their ideas about how to live in such a complicated world.
I got a round of applause for my talk, which felt good. I asked the class (40 students) how many wanted to be a writer when they finished school. Nobody raised their hand.
I asked how many sought a spiritual life. Nobody raised a hand.
I asked them how many were on TikTok, and every student raised their hand. I want to know more and listen more. And I wanted them to know that I respect their culture and understand how much it means to them.
A lot of them thanked me for that after class. It was a good start.
