Since the dawn of civilization, each generation has handed hard-won knowledge down to the next. This fact may seem glaringly obvious–and in any other age it would be–but something unprecedented happened to the West in the 60s.
The parents of generations X and Y collectively decided not to pass on the traditions they’d inherited from their ancestors.
It’s not that the generations born after the 60s weren’t interested. A member of Gen Y recently told me how his dad never taught him about investing. It’s worth noting that his dad is an accountant. Whenever he asked for financial advice, his dad would brush him off, saying, “You don’t need to worry about investing until you’ve got ten grand saved up.”
That’s just one example of many. But why beat a dead horse when we can see the effects of this cultural signal jamming everywhere? Baby Boomers love to browbeat Millennials for not knowing how to boil water. They seldom stop to think about why not.
The following goes for members of every generation from the Greats to to Gen Y: If it comes to your attention that a younger member of your family lacks a basic skill that you possess, you are obliged to teach him.
Perhaps parents of the generations since the Silents have been so conditioned to let the state raise their kids, they figure the schools are teaching this stuff. That possibility itself speaks to a woeful ignorance of what goes on in schools these days.
Then again, the abandonment of parental instruction started decades before the schools started mandating devil worship. This widespread neglect has run up a bill that is now coming due.
- Many members of Generation Z do not know how to address an envelope.
- The skilled tradesmen who maintain our crumbling infrastructure are retiring, and no one is replacing them.
- Much of our digital architecture was created by men who are nearing retirement, retired, or dead. When the last of them go, there will be no one who knows how essential code and processes work.
- Most young men cannot find young women who know how to cook spaghetti without burning it.
- Large swaths of Millennials and Zoomers are de facto heathens whose only knowledge of Christianity comes from Reddit and Netflix.
Entitlement programs may force you to pay some people who hate you, but you can always learn how to curb your support for the others.
Not all of us, sir. This boomer taught both of his stepdaughters how to do many things. After retiring from my first profession and getting into teaching, I also taught practical street survival and many common tasks to my students and neighborhood kids.
A big problem with Gen Y and Millennials is their mindset. They are in the thrall of TV, gaming, and other electronic pastimes. They have no interest in learning how to fix a toilet or a sink, change a tire, clean a firearm, read a book, etc. They have become, BY THEIR OWN VOLITION AND WITH THE TACIT CONSENT OF THEIR PARENTS, shambling, texting, slack-jawed, mouth-breathing, brain-dead, soulless, vaping, Mall Zombies.
The good news is there are several younglings out there who are still enrolled in technical schools and will be making bank as plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics, health-care professionals, and so on. All is not lost. But we are in a downward social, moral, and cultural spiral in this corrupt and syphilitic-thinking septic tank of a nation. Bleib ubrig.
YouTube videos on how to change a tire get millions of views. Books on “adulting” aimed at Millennials are best sellers.
I make a living teaching skills to Ys and Millennials. Saying they don’t want to learn is parroting a ridiculous zombie meme.
I also make a living teaching. The student body at my technical college is now mostly Millenials and Zoomers, with a few Xers and other older students in the mix. In fact, students in my own generational cohort usually are the older students. It sometimes frustrating to discover what they don’t know, but the notion that they don’t care to learn is simply absurd. Some do the work and some don’t, but that isn’t a unique generational characteristic. That is just life as a teacher. I imagine the headmaster at Shakespeare’s grammar school might have had similar gripes and similar joys about his students. If Millenials and Zoomers struggle to learn compared to previous generations, because the schools are now a total and systemic failure, that simply illustrates the way that previous generations strip-mined Western civilization and left them, and us, with the slag and the dross.
The first generations in all of history that “don’t want to learn” is such a weird thing to say. That mentality didn’t pop out of nowhere to randomly infect children.
It’s the same thing when I hear about Mills and Zoomers who choose to live on welfare instead of getting low paying jobs. Why wouldn’t they? They have absolutely no reason to make less money by doing more, especially when they’ve been taught since birth that their is no greater purpose to life than material objects and consooming. “Teach them a work ethic” I hear. Okay, for what?
This is why we’re in the situation we’re in: the same reason there are Millennials who don’t know how many apostles followed Christ and Zoomers who have never even seen a Church in their entire lives. It’s not just a failure to pass on: it’s a failure to give meaning to the future or life itself.
All they know is that they’re getting screwed, and are trying to not get screwed. Life is a struggle, then you die. No wonder suicide rates are up.
We got off track, and it’s asking a lot for people who don’t know better to suddenly understand this. Unless we teach them they will continue to flail about in the dark. This is going to be considerably tough considering local communities don’t exist anymore, but it’s inevitable.
At this point, we just need to admit there’s a problem that needs addressing instead of throwing insults or making excuses about it. Things need to change through action or they will only get worse.
It’s almost as though driving a tank as a teenager or getting shot by your own air support somehow doesn’t make you a good parent. It’s almost as though it takes more than PTSD to avoid raising the most entitled generation in history…
http://www.ww2incolor.com/d/477023-4/watermarkcomp
Dave’s article reminds me to be extra grateful that my parent’s marriage survived and I and my wife (God willing) are passing that on to our children. An intact family alone covers a multitude of shortcomings.
P.S. I was reading reviews of Don’t Give Money and saw one that gave you four stars. Docked one because you neglected to mention the jooooos! I laughed over my bagel with cream cheese.
Sorry. That was supposed to be a general reply, not to D Cal specifically.
I’m not the only counterculture writer who’s gotten reviews like that. The opposition is getting smarter about leaving attack reviews. They’ve learned that 1 and 2 star drive-bys which betray a clear failure to read the book get ignored. Now they’re at least reading the back cover blurb and leaving reviews that seem mostly positive, except for one detail that implicitly tars the author as one of the Death Cult’s bogeymen.
It could be from the death cult, or it could be by one of Teddy Spaghetti’s readers. It depends on how bitter you made the alt retards.
You’re clearly new here.
Is there a BRIAN NIEMEIER: THE ABRIDGED SERIES that can bring me up to speed?
It’s not my responsibility to bring new readers up to speed. It’s their responsibility to read through posts and lurk to learn the blog culture before commenting.
Since 2017, if I recall. It seems like only yesterday that you won your Dragon award or fell out with Declan Finn over a popular movie. I don’t remember if it was SOLO or one of the Avengers movies.
I also remember the short-lived popularity of #BrandZero and #AGundamForUs and scratching my head over the creation of XSeed. I even joked with someone that you would merchandise XSeed with little figurines, because I never realized how aggressively you intended to market it. It was around that time that you learned from Adam Lane Smith to personally engage with your readers on Twitter instead of tweeting robotic updates.
Despite this, I don’t recall whether or not you were personally attacked by the alt right, and I also missed your spat with Doris Sutherland.
Supposition withdrawn.
I often had to go begging the Greatest Generation to teach me something, and a lot of them were smug and cocksure I’d foul it up anyway. Many times they would not do it. Them and their F88888888888 “secrets” and their get taxes to pay for EVERYTHING attitude. Often, I was laughed at by them for my ignorance, seldom I was corrected and taught. My attitude my whole life has been to not repeat that mistake. I don’t think ignorance is funny, I think it is deadly. I teach anyone who will listen about anything I know, and have done so for fifty years now.
Not everybody is right. Got three and all are capable wage earners, that can do things.
I might have been lucky, Christian, and whatever but I was engaged. I do remember people saying about their kids “I am not interested in anything but watching sports or playing video games” I had one like that he went in the Marine Corp and found reality.
Blame Boomers all you want, ANYONE has to have interest to learn.
A part of what older people don’t get about younger generations is that they were so poorly taught that they don’t actually know what they’re missing or need to ask help for.
For instance, everyone I know went to college and none of them use anything they learned there today. They would have been better off getting a trade. But back at the time, none of the Boomers in charge would let anyone so much as a take an aptitude test because they didn’t want them to feel “boxed in” or some such nonsense. So instead they were left to flail around without any direction or clue of where to go.
Of course such a thing would only get worse with the passage of time, especially among younger generations who are deliberately given no higher purpose in life except to consoom and pay into a society that wouldn’t care if they were dead.
Something like this can only happen via a failure to pass down the important things in life.
It all comes down to narcissistic myopia. Boomers can’t see that the structured upbringing they received gave them the necessary foundation to pursue their passions. Even if you’re dead set on finding your own way, having a map of the territory gives you a big advantage.
But Boomers tore up the map instead of handing it down to their kids. They took it for granted so much that they can’t understand why younger generations don’t even know where to start.
Freedom without boundaries is a cruel prison.
Modern generations in a nutshell:
1860-1900: Got their kids/grandkids to murder one another in WWI and WWII for the glory of empire/ideology. The born psychopaths of the modern world who manage to get off without being justly criticized.
1900-1940: Got propagandized into murdering one another in wars. Nicknamed themselves the greatest generation. Permanently scarred because they are a bunch of mass murdering sociopaths.
1940-1980: The kids of said mass murdering sociopaths. Entered the world into a permanent state of war and then declared war on their own kids/future generations for the sake of ideology and narcissism. Also the first ones who specifically groomed (probably an accurate word here) their successors to be sociopaths.
1980-2020: Inheritors of a glorious legacy.
Brian
Speaking about giving a helping hand, I helped a student of mine how to use the spell checker on her word processor. I also sent her a link for a free software add on for grammar checking as the popular one for French is pricey.
In any case she had no idea but once she used it,her writing improved noticeably.
Same for teaching my secondary 3 French class to have reflex to use a dictionary to look up words.
Finally I was stunned at just how deeply culturally ignorant my secondary 1 and 2 students were in the ethics and religious culture class.
Should I ever teach it again. I’ll use art as expression of the religious experience.
xavier
Well “finding yourself” and “changing the world” don’t leave a whole lot of time for such mundane stuff like parenting. These (mea culpa) people are very special and can not waste their awesome talents doing what every generation before them did. Nope, their children had to wait for them to teach the world to sing first. They don’t call us the “me” generation for nothing.
Well, if there’s a silver lining, it’s that we’ve all been taught an important civilization-scale lesson.
Whether the lesson sinks in is up to future generations.
“If it comes to your attention that a younger member of your family lacks a basic skill that you possess, you are obliged to teach him.”
Frame it.
As a later Gen-Xer (1977) and veteran, I remember the years following 9-11 featuring many a discussions amongst my cohort along the lines of “this is where we step up,” especially in the 2004-2006 timeframe where it became obvious that things weren’t going as planned in Iraq and Afghanistan. We figured, as we became senior enlisted and senior officers, we would change things and become the leaders our generation needed to be.
And somehow, we never did, not in large enough numbers or radical enough to make a real impact. Or too many of us bought into Obama’s BS. I don’t know if it’s that there simply aren’t enough of us, or that too many of us are so handicapped or demoralized or just never grew up. I often get the impression that my generation is still standing in the corner with arms crossed, wearing a black hoodie and listening to some obscure brand no one will EVER give two d*mns about on a Sony Discman, and simply refusing to talk to our parents, or our younger siblings.
I really don’t understand us, and I wish I did. I’ve personally jettisoned much if not most of the music, movies, edgy pop psychology and philosophy and literature that were supposedly “mine,” because I recognize so much of as crap that doesn’t stand the test of time.
I wish my first breakaway point had come sooner – in my mid-twenties, I was reading a Spin Magazine article in an airport that called Kurt Cobain the “voice of Generation X” and immediately responded mentally with “says who, I didn’t choose him,” and “really that’s supposedly the best we can do?” – I felt insulted. Still do as a matter of fact, and it proved to me something else I’d suspected for a while – rock music journalism was garbage. Then, I played in a pop-punk cover band for about a year while serving in Korea (hey doing that on the weekend kept me out of trouble to tell you the truth).