We started off talking about core competencies and competitive advantages, but it quickly spiralled into a discussion on the reduction of skills due to inexperience, and where the future may be heading. The client is in the manufacturing business and has backed up claims that the younger workers that come into the company, are far less skilled than they should be, which is due to more digital learning, and less practical, hands-on practice. Not only this they are also more demanding of their working environment, focusing on enjoyment, rather than the tasks at hand. And, they are less patient, less resilient, yet have an inflated sense of their worth.
Changing, not improving.
His words, not mine.
Change is inevitable, but change doesn't always mean for the better. Most likely, no change is wholly for the better anyway, but the changes in the way we have been living our lives is likely leading us into worse results. For instance, Our young brains are shaped by our environment. If you picture locking a child into a room with white padded walls, giving them no toys, and not speaking to them for the first three years of their life, their brain is going to be shaped by their experience, or lack thereof. You might imagine that they are going to be lacking certain circuitry, as well as physical ability, due to not having the stimulus required to generate it.
This is what happens to all children, as their brains are shaped by the stimulus in the environment, combined with their natural genetic structure. A child who is hugged and read to, played and talked with, is going to develop a different brain structure, as well as emotional and physical framework than if that same child was sat in front of a screen for a lot of their early years. And this conditioning is going to affect their daily life in the future, and their access to opportunities and the way they handle their experiences.
Part of maturing is learning from mistakes, yet I don't think many people appreciate what this means in today's world, because mistakes rarely happen. At least in the same way they used to. A kid would go into the playground, fall over and scrape their knee, and learn. But in the digital environment, tactile learning doesn't happen, and all the mistakes get pushed into the mind and emotional realms only, where reality doesn't matter. What I mean by this is that a mistake can trigger the mental and emotional responses of failure, but the event doesn't need to be real at all. But because the brain is designed to learn to protect us from risk, these non-events become the learning environment for development, making them seem existential in nature, even though they are meaningless in reality.
A world without failure?
My client mentioned one of his colleagues from the US, who no one likes to talk to because speaking with him is a minefield. Every conversation becomes combative, because he sees everything as an attack on him, a threat to his existence. He is quite happy to talk about controversial topics however, but he can't deal with any disagreement from his own viewpoint. So everyone is "forced" to tippytoe, trying not to upset him.
He is a tyrant.
And that is what spoiled children become when they live a childhood of getting what they want, when they want it, and how they want it. When they don't have to deal with disappointment, or learn patience, or handle opinions that counter their own. And this is the environment that many young people have become accustomed to, as their digital fantasy world is a place where they are served what they want, when they want it, and do not have to handle anything they don't want to handle, because they can just move to another experience they want to have without cost.
There is always cost.
The cost is that we have to live in a world of tyrants who are unable to effectively discuss the topics that matter to humanity, because those topics are contentious and the conflicts trigger their anger, anxiety and discomfort. They have had a life devoid of discomfort, so they are very, very sensitive to anything that makes them feel slightly negative, which explains the extreme amount of depression in the younger generations too. But it isn't just the younger generations, because we are all in this world together, all being forced to endure an environment that has a lot of change, but very little improvement.
Whatever we think is the best version of ourselves, it is unlikely the one that feels the most pain, yet that is what we are conditioning ourselves for, as we keep avoiding little discomforts now, at the expense of feeling discomfort more readily later. It is a similar process to eating poorly now for the taste of the food, and making ourselves ill later due the habit of eating poorly.
We get what we want, not what we need.
It is an interesting conflict, because "getting what we want" should be serving our best interests, but it is not. Instead, it is creating an environment that supports our worst version, as we inevitably want what is not good for us in the long-term, and while the "future" never arrives, we change in the now to live in a now to come, as a worse version of who we are. If you let a child choose all of their meals, they are unlikely to end up as a healthy adult, but by then, their daily habits, their mental, physical and emotional wiring will be conditioned to eat poorly, and changing those habits becomes an immense job and possibly impossible.
Once an addict, always an addict.
This is because addiction creates such strong wiring in us, that once formed, it can only be contained, not destroyed. It is always there, ready to go back into service to give the carrier more of what they want. Yet, what we are doing with ourselves and our children now, is changing our brains into those of addicts who get what they want, not what they need.
To improve means change needs to happen, but it doesn't mean all change is good. In order to make good change, we need to understand what future outcome we want to have, and then start the actions that lead to that outcome. Change for the sake of change, rarely is going to reap the benefits of improvement, especially when we are conditioned to do what is easy for us to accept, rather than what is necessary for us to do.
And this isn't just about the "youth of today" because we are all affected by the way we are spending our time, getting more of what we want now by consuming what makes us feel good, rather than what supports our own development. And the more we do it, the more conditioned and narrow we become, as the pool of experience shrinks, and the number of our development actions decline and lessen in degree. We become more reliant, more demanding, and less capable.
Tyrants.
Taraz
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