The counter-argument about “the end of human civilization” is so hollow to me. I mean, what benefit does human civilization bring to anyone other than humans? It’s a circular argument. There’s no inherent need or reason for homo sapiens to continue ad infinitum. We could save literally countless other species by letting the single most destructive one die out.

Now, do I want to actively end the life of myself or anyone I know? Of course not. But at the same time I’m also never, ever having kids.

Much of the developed world is sliding into fascism because of climate change-driven migration. Environmentally, every decade for the foreseeable future will be worse than the one that preceded it. The technology that was supposed to make our lives better and easier is instead used to depress wages, or simply mechanize away jobs.

And all the while, most of those in positions of power - and their most loyal voters - are dead set against a universal basic income, instead opting for ever more oppressive wage slavery, simply because profits have to grow every quarter in spite of their natural tendency to decline.

These trends, along with many others, mean that the average child born in a developed nation today can more often than not expect a lower standard of living than that of their parents. And that pattern has no reason to reverse. The people running the world into oblivion have suckered too many rubes to go along with them via a false sense of cultural solidarity and hostility toward anyone they’re told not to like.

The line is going down. It’s been going down since the neoliberal turn, and nothing we do will pull it back up at this point. Too many global biophysical and socio-political systems have been broken in a self-reinforcing manner to revive the vitality of this planet as long as we continue to inhabit it. The best I personally can hope for is some global-scale healing to begin a couple hundred years after we’re gone.

I wish I could award you with fake Internet points.

It’s not the next generation that sucks. We suck for having made them this way.

I’ve noticed it a lot in my younger extended family: When something goes wrong, they wait for someone to tell them what to do next, rather than doing a rudimentary amount of googling to get the answer. I can imagine a few explanations (with the caveat that we are not talking about the top 1% of the class here):

1.) Learned helplessness. They feel they aren’t expert enough in anything to be able to rely on their own industry or facilities to figure something out.

2.) Learned helplessness by coddling from authorities. Education has gone so far in the direction of teaching-to-the-test, that they are certain that anything they are confronted with should have been fully explained and taught to them ahead of time. When a .zip file appears in a workplace setting, and no one has officially told them in the workplace setting how to handle a .zip file, they “go find an adult.”

3.) Purely applied-education, foregoing theory entirely. I am suspicious that, for example, teaching algebra through real-world application actually limits the students to using algebraic principles only when those specific real-world applications arise. I would love to run an experiment wherein you never told the students why they needed to know how to figure out 2x+3=5, and see if they are better able to apply such principles outside of school since they themselves would be the ones coming up with the situations to test out whether what they learned could help. Sort of like going back to phonics, instead of whole-language. I learned how to count to 10 in Spanish from Sesame Street songs that just (to my spacey young mind) popped up out of nowhere, with no accompanying explanation about when/where I was supposed to use this knowledge.

Essentially, I guess, my contention is that American K-12 (and, I think, college) schools are turning into concentrated animal feeding operations, where kids are not allowed to turn around in their cages, and are spoon/force-fed the specific nutrients that testing quotas demand on the other end. They learn and live in an environment of hyper-surveillance, which they are repeatedly told keeps them safe. They are not confronted with novel situations where they have to teach themselves how to apply what they have learned, because they are increasingly kept in a completely controlled environment.

I’m not saying that everyone needs to emerge at age 17 a scholar enjoying a completely un-alienated life of the mind, but I do think that we are actively NOT teaching kids how to think on their own, by the very nature of trying to teach things in the most relevant way, and in the safest-possible environment. Our good intentions are inhibiting the educational development of those who come after us.

So, to reiterate my original thesis, it’s not that the next generation sucks. We suck for making them this way.

We need to block ads so that ads die. Anti-angiogenesis for advertising. Get a less annoying business model.

That said, I have YouTube premium at that I don’t see ads.

We just muted the TV during the ads and did something else until the show came back on. Ad breaks for regular shows like dramas were a predictable length of time, so you could time your bathroom or fridge run pretty well.