Last week, a friend's 19 year old daughter stepped out in front of a train.
It is heartbreaking.
As a parent, I don't know what I would do in this circumstance and I hope I will never find out. However, it seems relatively common these days and I feel helpless to do anything about it, other than write, because the reasons I believe are a large part of the problem, don't seem to be a problem for many others.
Disconnection.
Or perhaps, true connection.
I feel that especially amongst many of the young, they no longer care about building quality relationships, and see them more as mechanisms "for a good time, not a long time". Everything is transient, everything disposable, everything fluid. And whilst this is a good thing in some respects, humans have a need for security, a need for stability, and since we also have a need for intimacy, often it is the relationships of our loved ones and our community that ground us.
Without this foundation however, many of us spiral, and with our ability to surround ourselves with on-demand content, we can feed the best, and the worst of us. With all that could be consumed, social media is likely what brings out the worst in us as groups, and as individuals. Encouraging and seducing us with attractive incentives, it gives us a platform to judge others, and put ourselves out there to be judged by peers.
But, "peers" is not quite the case, is it? Instead, they are strangers. Unknowns who have no skin in the game, but are looking for attention, looking for status, looking to make themselves feel better in a world where they are unimportant, small, disposable. And lonely too. And through the lens of a digital filter, cruelty is just the culture.
And that lens turns inward too, where a person feels the need to make their mark, be known, be seen, be relevant. Selfie after selfie desperately begging to a sea of strangers asking, "look at me!". And when they don't, or when they don't like what they see, a person feels smaller. But when they do get that positive affirmation, they feel great, the dopamine kicks in and they are on top of the world. But like any drug, it wears off, and then more is needed to get the same high, but the tolerance builds, and it wears off faster.
But there is nowhere to turn.
The youth think that they are so unique, so special, so the adults don't understand them. And because of how special they are, they divide themselves constantly, identifying with one trait, or another, and then more. Building themselves from slivers of self-proclaimed identity, shouting it to the world, but no one cares. And, because they have built their identity around such complexity, they feel that no one "gets them", no one truly sees them for who they are - or who they think they are.
We want to be known.
Yet, rather than building the relationships with people who matter, people who are close to us, people who we can develop shared experiences with. We share embellished views of ourselves with strangers who will spend less than a second scrolling past our image, all for the hope of getting some attention, to draw upon for self-esteem, or to monetize.
I was talking with a colleague today who is the same age as my niece and discussed the misconceptions of inclusion. People keep dividing themselves, boxing and isolating themselves, labeling themselves, and then demand to be included. But that is exclusion. Inclusion requires taking the labels off of ourselves and recognizing that different or not, we each have value. And we are at least 99.5% the same at the DNA level with anyone else on earth, but probably even more than that with the person next to us.
Even bananas have 44% identical DNA to humans.
She didn't believe me on that. Until I Googled it for her.
But bananas don't have the qualities that matter to us as humans. They do not connect with us, they do not listen, they do not remember the times shared, the laughs shared. They do not care for us when we are ill, they do not hold us when we cry, and they do not support us to be our best. They have skin, but none in our game.
There are so many reasons that impact on our general wellbeing, but especially on that of the young. We have built a culture of isolation, where the foundations of community and family have been eroded and replaced by an illusionary self, a mask for the world, even though it conflicts with the reality of who we are.
Living a lie daily.
It is not only unhealthy, it wears us down emotionally and psychologically. We suffer physically too, and our bodies tell us that there is something wrong, that we are not feeding it what it needs to be well, but instead of changing our diet, we double down on the junk that makes us spiral.
We have built an information landscape where a person needn't be consistent, needn't be stable, needn't have a global world-view, because they can pick and choose what get their attention, and how they want to be seen in that narrow, isolated, compartmentalized box. They can be who they want to be in that sliver, but no one knows who they really are as a whole.
Who we are.
It is not just the young that are suffering, it is all of us. All our hearts are broken.
And no amount of selfies will ever make it whole.
Are you okay?
Am I?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]