I read that folks can now buy “likes” on Facebook. I can imagine being a company and wanting to increase your “likability” by purchasing some fake goodwill, but I understand that individuals can do the same. They seem to be a lot of young folks.
Psychiatrists have pontificated lately on the sexual-harassment quandaries we find ourselves in today. The big takeaway is if someone thinks they were sexually harassed, it’s true to them. It may not be factually true but it is true to them. Same story with hate speech and bigotry, sexism and ethnocentrism. This especially applies to young people.
77% of college educated young people believe that gender is not determined at birth but is chosen. The little factoid called college educated youth “adolescent”. I thought adolescence stopped when the “teens” stopped. Now I am told that adulthood starts at 30.
Eugene Peterson wrote in a book called “The Contemplative Pastor”, that our generation shows it’s sinfulness by being adolescent and a-historical. Adolescence means being unrealistic and having misdirected expectations, impatience, a high degree of self centeredness, and a fragile ego. To be a-historical means that anything from the past could not have any meaningful impact on today. This ain’t your grandpas reality tunnel.
The rise of social media and internet obsession has created a crisis that some are calling the “social validation feedback loop”, which is, near as I can tell the idea that we only receive our validity as human beings by how many times we are friended on Facebook or retweeted on twitter. I have images in my brain of a pajama boy in his basement looking at his Twitter follow list and acting like Sally Field at the Oscars holding her trophy and crying and wailing, “you like me, you really like me”.
I am not sure what any of this means. The deficiency of meaning seems to apply to anything anymore. I marked in one of my notes a statement that I will have to find the author of someday. In a rant about “kids these days”, he came to the conclusion that they are meaning deficient too, and that they will inherit from their parents a spiritual void and the bill from the card it was charged to.
