...as I am feeling especially foul this morning. Maybe it was the lights and my computer that were left on all night (I know, it's only electricity...that I pay for...), maybe it's the overcast glumness outside, maybe it's because my hair is thinning, maybe it's that I have a class today. Who knows.
Well actually I do know. The trick is to express this artfully.
There are times when I feel as if we've failed as a nation with our young people. We've raised a generation to believe that things like cellphones and mobile access are givens in life that just magically appear and just happen to work month after month. We've done out best to insulate them from the reality that in life sometimes you win and sometimes you don't win. We've taught them that the only people that matter are the slim and the glamorous, but yet we are nation full of obese young people. We have done an outstanding job of separating choice from consequences, reality from economics.
What have we done? We've taught them that the single most important thing in the world is to feel good. Yes, feeling good reins over all. The problem is that if you try and feel good all the time, you are less equipped to handle things when you don't feel good. Same thing goes for winning: when you are taught that everyone is a winner, in reality no one wins and when you do fail to win, that fall is especially hard.
We've become a nation of the soft dullard, where "sacrifice" is something that you see on television (even better viewed via mobile access on your cellphone), but never actually consider yourself. Why? Because it doesn't feel immediately good when you sacrifice. Since so many are now devoid of the ability to handle things like sacrifice, not feeling good all the time, and all believe that all have an inalienable right to technology. Ever see someone pay for groceries with an Access card while using their Blackberry cell phone?
In short...
We lead people to believe that they are entitled to things that in reality are optional.
We lead people to believe that you need to look like Jennifer Aniston to be happy, but yet we still love fast & junk food and we don't want to put any effort in at being healthy.
We lead people to believe that winning is a right.
We lead people to believe that sacrifice is something that others do.
Our collective attention span has now decreased to a maximum of 140 characters.
It's no wonder that the use of anti-depressant medication has increased approximately 75% since 1996.
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