Day 5: Millenials
Once again, looking online, I got to see the sheer amount of opposition online to millenials. With mounting college dept and a desire for solid high paying jobs, our generation was told that life would be good when, for a lot of us, it is a struggle. However, I think there is a factor that, besides the new environment, really keeps a lot of us from living our lives: technology.
When I say technology, I am not referring to all of the marvels we have in this day and age. The ability we have to learn anything and do anything really can make a difference in how people live their lives, and I respect the sheer effort that people put in to making our modern life. Toasters, refrigerators, modern medicine - all of this work is without any blame, as those things allow us to live our lives with less effort and allow us to do what we love, whatever that happens to be. What I am referring to is the war of attention we have to play with everything that's pulling our minds.
While each generation of our species is more intelligent than the last, if we look at the sole metric of IQ, our generation seems to be the one most plagued with mental trauma. We seem to have more cases of depression, more cases of anxiety, more cases of ADHD, and other forms of mental disease. While a lot of this can obviously be attributed to increased medical surveillance. I think that our attachment to our devices is the real issue. We all are glued to our devices, and for the most part none of the information we get serves to do anything other than keep us glued to the screen. While I love the modern conveniences of talking to friends from far away, I am becoming increasingly more concerned with the background levels of distraction my phone provides. Ever since I naively turned on the history feature to let YouTube know more information about what I browse, my recommended tab has become a hotspot of content that I simply cannot get enough of, leading to rabbit holes upon rabbit holes of internet that leave me both hoping for more and disgusted with my vulnerability to my lack of concentration. I once started to write a journal article, and "had to watch" to whole YouTube videos during that time, becoming so distracted that my entire train of thought was lost. These issues, and more, seem all to related to how modern technology can infect our brains. By ensuring we stay glued to whats happening and what is "important", we lose sight of what we wish to do, causing a lot of us to feel tired when we literally haven't been awake for too long, or decide to skip class when we think it does not matter anymore. My guess to the cause of all of this is the sheer amount of extra information we are given, and the sheer amount of decisions we have to make. Without a set schedule and a set routine, we lose our lives to our technology as we cling from one day to the next. I just hope one day I'll get out of it.
When I say technology, I am not referring to all of the marvels we have in this day and age. The ability we have to learn anything and do anything really can make a difference in how people live their lives, and I respect the sheer effort that people put in to making our modern life. Toasters, refrigerators, modern medicine - all of this work is without any blame, as those things allow us to live our lives with less effort and allow us to do what we love, whatever that happens to be. What I am referring to is the war of attention we have to play with everything that's pulling our minds.
While each generation of our species is more intelligent than the last, if we look at the sole metric of IQ, our generation seems to be the one most plagued with mental trauma. We seem to have more cases of depression, more cases of anxiety, more cases of ADHD, and other forms of mental disease. While a lot of this can obviously be attributed to increased medical surveillance. I think that our attachment to our devices is the real issue. We all are glued to our devices, and for the most part none of the information we get serves to do anything other than keep us glued to the screen. While I love the modern conveniences of talking to friends from far away, I am becoming increasingly more concerned with the background levels of distraction my phone provides. Ever since I naively turned on the history feature to let YouTube know more information about what I browse, my recommended tab has become a hotspot of content that I simply cannot get enough of, leading to rabbit holes upon rabbit holes of internet that leave me both hoping for more and disgusted with my vulnerability to my lack of concentration. I once started to write a journal article, and "had to watch" to whole YouTube videos during that time, becoming so distracted that my entire train of thought was lost. These issues, and more, seem all to related to how modern technology can infect our brains. By ensuring we stay glued to whats happening and what is "important", we lose sight of what we wish to do, causing a lot of us to feel tired when we literally haven't been awake for too long, or decide to skip class when we think it does not matter anymore. My guess to the cause of all of this is the sheer amount of extra information we are given, and the sheer amount of decisions we have to make. Without a set schedule and a set routine, we lose our lives to our technology as we cling from one day to the next. I just hope one day I'll get out of it.
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