I’m Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.
Ask them about what’s important to them and they’ll counter your enthusiasm with a shrug and a mumbled, “I don’t know.” Somewhere between kid-dom and adolescence, your child stops asking sweek, inquisitive questions and starts acting like everything you care about and they used to care about is now completely useless.
I know, I’m dangerously close to sounding like every other person from the older generation here, lamenting the lost younger generation. But I’m going to go out on a limb and propose that really, today, something is different with our teenagers.
Maybe it’s just a matter of degree … I was pretty obsessed with being cool in my teenage years as well … but we have to be open to the possibility that the decay we see in all areas of our planetary experience has spilled over into our young people.
And I don’t mean just that difficult teenage time when rebeliousness seems a rite of passage. Of course, there are extraordinary and idealistic young people, dedicated and talented. But there’s a lot of decadence, too. Let’s try to understand it better today.
They Tyranny of Cool, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.