Changes in Young Worlds

[Koldo]

So would you think that smoking 3 packs of cigarettes, drinking a pint of whisky, and gorging on french fries and a Big Mac every day qualifies as a fulfilling and meaningful life? I'm not talking about occasional indulgences. As I clearly stated, moderation is fine. I'm talking about living an unhealthy lifestyle. Does that sound like a recipe of a 'fulfilling and meaningful life' to you, as you put it?

So, burying your face in a computer screen, never interacting with other humans, never getting exercise, never getting out into nature, never doing anything that the body requires to be healthy, you define as a 'fulfilling and meaningful life'? Color me skeptical in the extreme.

Who are we to judge what's meaningful and fulfilling to someone else?

 

[Koldo]

I'm on a genealogy forum and it never ceases to amaze when someone asks for help reading a document written in cursive. Much of the time, it's not illegible or an older style of cursive but crisp, mid-to-late 20th-century material in neat penmanship. As a kid, I had a teacher who gave the best answer to "why do I have to learn this stuff? I'm never going to use it!". ("It" being whichever subject the kid was struggling with.) They said it wasn't just learning the subject, the real benefit was that we were developing our brains. That we use different parts of our brain when learning something, our brains change as we learn something new. So grades were only so important, a person who gave their best but got a C was ahead of someone who got a C because they didn't even try. Even if a person forgot every fact of a subject later on, they still had the benefit and the ability to work through other things. As someone mentioned, back in the day you weren't allowed calculators. Even if the answer was wrong, a teacher could see whether you had some understanding of what needed to be done to sort out the problem and where you miscalculated.

That sounds more like a convenient excuse than a proper reason.

The problem I see with skills and subjects being dropped is that they're not being replaced with anything that compensates for the mental development those dropped subjects provided. As a comparison, gym class wasn't taught in schools until the late 1800s and originated in urban areas. Kids weren't as physically active as previous generations when they either had lots of physical chores (manual tasks slowly replaced by innovations) and had to work on family farms, or simply had to walk great distances to get to and from school. Today's kids are more sedentary than ever before but we're not compensating for that so now we have widespread childhood obesity (no pun intended) and children with things like Type 2 Diabetes... Type 2 used to be called Adult-Onset Diabetes but now thousands of kids have it.

Which has more to do with diet than exercises, to be fair.

We're raising generations that will largely be incapable of doing anything without being plugged into something that does the work for them. "When the zombie apocalypse happens", it wouldn't surprise me that the survival of the fittest will be a lot of older persons who learned skills before the digital era and know how to use a can opener.

I don't think we should be worried about things that almost surely won't happen.

 

[Windwalker]

Who are we to judge what's meaningful and fulfilling to someone else?

Who are we to call self-destruction fulfilling? Is this a real question? "I'm so happy with my life I want to self-destruct"? Is this even logical to you?

I'll grant that is a personal choice for people, but I would hardly consider it "meaningful and fulfilling". It's simply a personal choice to disengage and self destruct, and "who am I to judge", in that case. If that's what they want to do with their lives, it is their choice. But is it a healthy choice, that truly brings meaning and fulfilment to them?

If people are happy with their lives, which is what the meaning of "meaning and fulfillment" is saying, they naturally wish to continue live and thrive, and not to implode and self-destruct. And if they don't want to die, but can't help themselves with a self-destructive pattern of living, then they are likely victims of addiction, which is a dysfunction of the system, a unhealthy pattern.

Addiction has a way of lying to us, saying that that unhealthy pattern is what we really want, that "I enjoy smoking! These are my 20 friends in a box who make me happy all day", or my happiness is found in a bottle, or gorging, or non-stop video games 18 hours a day. Screen addiction. I wonder if that is a diagnosis yet? I can't imagine it wouldn't be.

 

[Koldo]

Who are we to call self-destruction fulfilling? Is this a real question? "I'm so happy with my life I want to self-destruct"? Is this even logical to you?

That's definitely not what I had in mind.
I was thinking on terms of: "I'm so happy with my life that I would rather die living this life like this than to do something else that would make me live longer.". Does that seem logical to you now?

I'll grant that is a personal choice for people, but I would hardly consider it "meaningful and fulfilling". It's simply a personal choice to disengage and self destruct, and "who am I to judge", in that case. If that's what they want to do with their lives, it is their choice. But is it a healthy choice, that truly brings meaning and fulfilment to them?

To choose to disengage is not to choose self-destruction though.

If people are happy with their lives, which is what the meaning of "meaning and fulfillment" is saying, they naturally wish to continue live and thrive, and not to implode and self-destruct. And if they don't want to die, but can't help themselves with a self-destructive pattern of living, then they are likely victims of addiction, which is a dysfunction of the system, a unhealthy pattern.

Addiction has a way of lying to us, saying that that unhealthy pattern is what we really want, that "I enjoy smoking! These are my 20 friends in a box who make me happy all day", or my happiness is found in a bottle, or gorging, or non-stop video games 18 hours a day. Screen addiction. I wonder if that is a diagnosis yet? I can't imagine it wouldn't be.

Is addiction the actual problem though?