In 2014, the internet turned 25. We're a quarter century into a completely new age, and we now have children who don't know life without the internet. The internet has changed the world as we know it, both for better and for worse. Information is available within a matter of seconds in many places all over the globe. There's wider access to learning, more opportunity to discover more interests, and we have a much more efficient, global culture. On the flip side, more access to information can be both good and bad, and people have wider access to information facilitating illegal or dangerous activity. Children have so many stimuli these days that attentions spans continue to whittle away to nothing. The item I have been thinking about, though, is that in this day and age, people have a far greater inability to cope with loss. Loss, in this instance, doesn't mean death, just lost contact.
Fifty years ago, I doubt teens were drastically different at high school graduation time. Many had thought of the friends they made, how great their friendships were, and how they were going to have those friendships for life. A few short years later, they could count on one hand the people from high school they maintained contact with. It was a lesson at a young age: life is transient; you go through stages in life, and they are nothing more than stages. Every person one comes into contact with fulfills a role or has a purpose, and the overwhelming majority of these people are not there for the long haul, nor should they be. The operative word in the phrase "growing up" is growing. Latching on to the same people forever much more closely resembles stagnation than it does growth. That's not to say if you're not drastically changing your life every few years, you are stagnating, but think of the old mining towns. You grew up knowing you'd be a miner because your father and his father before him were miners, and all your friends were going to be miners, too. The ability to move on to a new chapter in life is very important to our development, but it's one that is becoming progressively less acquired.
Today that skill isn't becoming acquired to the same degree because of social networking sites. Now the friend you were going to have that deep bond with forever is one of 600 friends of yours on Facebook. Are you still best friends? No, probably not, but they're only an internet connection away at any moment. There's less and less frequently ever an occasion to say good bye to someone simply because they may never actually leave your life. If you spent your life never having moved a significant distance, it means you never had any farewells to deal with. One could argue that this is actually a neat phenomenon, but I don't share the same sentiment. It hides young individuals from the one skill that is probably most important in life: adaptation to change. Change is one of life's few certainties, and no, people no longer being part of an individual's life is not the only instance of change, but it is a significant one. There's something to be said for having the ability to learn and move on from a situation, and that may go lacking for many of the younger generation today.
Take, for example, a relationship. Suppose you are in a relationship with someone suffering from some sort of trauma or anxiety of some sort. You invest a lot of time and energy into the relationship and work hard to support your significant other because you love him/her. It's a draining process, but you don't regret it because you see something in that person that makes you want to try harder and harder each day, something that maybe others don't see. Over a period of time, the relationship doesn't work out, and maybe it doesn't end so well. Now, what is human instinct?
"I sunk so much time and energy into something, I want to see it through/I want to see the fruits of my labor".
It's a common thought, but a misguided one. You didn't do those things chasing the end result, you did them out of love. Now is a good time to take the good for what it was, to feel good about any benefit you may have had on someone's life, and then accept that you may not ever see the person's growth after that. Or maybe you do, and you're exposed to someone else benefiting from a change you helped create in a person. You have two ways to react: jealousy (I deserve that reward), or acceptance. Here's where I think lacking the ability to detach comes into play. Children and young adults are becoming so accustomed to not dealing with impermanence that situations like this, and many others, will result in reacting in a detrimental manner. Has the internet created an inability to let go? Well, I certainly don't see that it has helped. To me, it is such a huge source of stress and anxiety, and unless we identify issues like this, along with numerous others, it's only going to get worse. I am in no way saying the internet is bad, simply that it merits looking at some of the behavioral issues stemming from its existence.
Thoughts?
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