We have been remodeling some old farm houses at the farm, circa 1924. I chiseled out an old fireplace and wood stove, and as I took out the bricks I threw them in a pile. The pile was my selfish reason to show my wife how hard I had been working and gain some old man sympathy—-whatever that is.
Anyway, one day as I was out there working, I took two of my grandsons, ages four and two. While I was busy doing other things, they found this pile of rubble and began their work of creation. The parents of these two are very sensitive and protective of the time they spend on electronic devices. As a result, there are noticeably more imaginative than others their age who are babysat by the electronics of the day.
This isn’t a
n official research study, but it’s my own observation in my family, (which is even more valuable to me), that the ethics and imagination required to build a solid future can more effectively be done if we learn to manage our time, which might include putting some restriction on the time spent with media consumption. This is not just a challenge for the millennial generation; it is also a challenge for boomers and others. For example, Nielsen Research found that the average adult has increased their time spent on smartphone applications by 63% in the past two years. I’m not saying electronic media is all bad; I’m saying it may be limiting the cultivation of other fields.
Here are some statistics I reviewed as I developed this idea of what we are building. 30% of college students drop out after year one and only 40% graduate. One third of all 18-34 year olds live with their parents. Of this group, most of them spend 60% of their day consuming media.
A staggering five million Americans also spend 45 hours a week on video games. This combined phenomenon has created what one author has coined “The crisis of idleness and drift” (Ben Sasse in The Vanishing American Adult).
We are experiencing a radical economic disruption from careers developed for a single job, to a requirement of developing skills to bear on a multiplicity of jobs and career spaces over a lifetime.
All of this and more has caused young adults to invent a new word “adulting” where they talk about things that were simply a part of growing up to a previous generation, and are now identified as events. Our culture wasn’t created to accommodate perpetual adolescence, so there is a large void of positive past culture that is not transmitting to the rising generation. It might be good to consider some of the barriers to inculcating positive culture of prior generations and consider carefully what we are building. It may be that what we build going forward is akin to creating something great from the bubble of our past.
I say this while still maintaining a profound awe for the Millennials and X’rs and all of the wonderful things they are teaching us about life and finding meaning in it. That being said, my hope is that we can all learn a lesson or two from my grandchildren (the rising generations) and from our past generations.
Making something from nothing is the start of a new beginning, just as my grandsons were creating something from a pile of rubble. It does require hard work, creativity, and persistence. It requires imagination too, which increases almost in proportion to the time we spend away from the media monster.
I’ve talked about generational bridges in previous blog posts, and in part two of this post I will invite all generations to consider how each of our paths intertwines as we create a future together. Until the next posting!
