Words to live by
I have come to the realization over the years that this generation of young people has had an advantage, or a difference, compared to every generation before it in that it did not have to grow up with any pain. Pain was optional for them. And that explains a lot.
Growing up I learned very quickly that stupidity was painful. I also learned that pain is an outstanding teacher because you only needed to feel pain once to learn. Some lectures in college I would have to go to pore over again and again and again to get what I was supposed to learn. Pain on the other hand was quite efficient in getting its message across. You show off on your bicycle and you crash and it hurts. Quite a humbling experience and a valuable lesson. You slide improperly into second base and you end up with raspberries (we called them) in uncomfortable places, and an upset mom, and you learned your lesson. You threw rotten apples at the hornet’s nests and you got stung and you learned not to do that again.
You drank way too much, which some people actually called getting stupid, and you hurt. You lie or gossip and suddenly you’re sitting in the school lunchroom alone, and it hurts, and you learn not to participate in that sort of stupidity again because loneliness is real. Growing up we did stupid things and by doing those stupid things we learned not to do them again.
And then we learned peripherally by observing other people’s stupidity, and seeing the pain that they went through, and so we even learned vicariously. I believe every generation of humanity has had this: regardless of socioeconomic background, regardless of ethnicity, their primary professor inside and outside the home has been pain. And often that pain was the lecture delivered while doing something stupid.
But I am noticing with the generation coming of age now is that pain is not part of their learning environment because so many of their lessons are/were virtual. They can play games in which they kill and are killed and feel nothing. When I played games and I tackled with bad form I got wiped out by the person I was trying to tackle and it didn’t feel good. They make a mistake and some online gamer from New Hampshire smokes them they don’t feel a thing. Maybe they should add cattle prod technology to the game consoles so that every time you did something stupid, or got shot or ‘killed’, you would get a jolt of intelligence.
I grew up with money being real. I learned that when you had $10 that $10 could buy things. I also learned that when I had $10 and spent $5 you only had $5 left and that’s all I had left.
And so there was a hurt at seeing my wallet get smaller.
And I also learned that if I had $10 I could never ever buy something that cost $12.
But when your pain is virtual and not real, when there is no inherent lesson or accountability from doing something stupid, or suffering loss, then you really do not understand how when you all you have is 10 you can’t spend 100.
One of the ways that we got smarter when we were growing up is that we did stupid things and we paid the consequences for them. The consequences were pain and as I said before pain is one of the most efficient professors and lecturers that has ever been created. I guess we called that the school of hard knocks.
Some hard knock graduates were born into their classroom and not by any choices or actions they did. I am talking about the classroom you entered because you did something dumb. Now ideally you learned from that and you didn’t repeat it. Some lectures you don’t have to go to twice. But what if you have never felt any real negative consequences for doing something dumb? If you have virtual friends you never feel loneliness. What if you can do outrageous things and say outrageous things and suffer no real social consequences?
How in the world are you ever going to learn what you need to know to be a useful citizen?
