Psyche in Eden

I suppose some explanation is needed… my high school library has a “free books” cart that I raid almost every day.  Today I came across a book filled with questions for teens to ask themselves that aide in the self-discovery process.  I fully intended to answer the first question in a brief but concise paragraph.  Needless to say, I got a bit carried away.

Prompt: If you were to predict what your generation will contribute to the world, what would you say?

Like every generation, we will contribute some good and some bad.  My generation, on one hand, is lazy, rude, and irresponsible.  On the other hand, we are beginning to question some rules and customs that are either corrupt or outdated.  I believe that a few brilliant creative minds will propel the world forward with art and science, but I don’t think there will be very many of those geniuses, or that they will necessarily be accepted.  It appalls me to see how rare imagination is in people of my generation; perhaps it is the video games, TV, and electronic toys that do everything under the sun that caused this atrophying of creativity.  The question I often hear is “what can it do,” when what I should hear is “what can I do with it?”  Having grown up in an age when one is constantly bombarded with media, many of my generation never had to engage their minds to find their own way to entertain themselves.  I, for the most part, escaped this; most of my toys were low-tech, requiring my imagination to make them interesting, and I was on my own often because my parents were young, and both of them needed to work much of the time.

The school system, ironically, is no help.  Though the structure of our schedule, assignments, and grades gives us stability, it can also work against us by making us require instructions to function.  Instead of teaching us how to think, school teaches us what to think.  One of my friends is faced with a problem not uncommon to my generation: she was assigned to write something over 700 words.  That is all the instruction she was given.  It is not the length that daunts her–700 words is quite short– but the lack of instruction; she has no idea what to write.  Instead of feeling liberated by the freedom, she is lost.  This is an example of what I chose to call the “Build-a-Bear Effect”.  Children are made to feel that they are being creative in “making” their own stuffed animal, when really all they are doing is watching it be stuffed.  This pseudo-creativity only serves to further repress true creative spirit by not allowing it to grow and flourish with freedom.

Society, too, is to blame by putting less emphasis on creation, and more on consumption.  Children are taught not to make things on their own, but buy something someone else has made.  This goes hand in hand with the disappearing imagination; kids are constantly given someone else’s manufactured world in the form of movies, TV, and video games, so they never bother or feel inclined to create their own.

In spite of our many downfalls, my generation includes a few revolutionaries that would change the system for the better.  These people push for equal human rights, protection of those rights, and (as V suggested in V For Vendetta) government fearing the people, rather than people fearing their government.  These revolutionaries, though powerful, are few and far between.  Our reliance on the media makes my generation complacent and easy to manipulate.

We disrespect history; we ignore it.  Many of my generation seem to believe that history is irrelevant–now is all-important.  It is true that we should not brood over the past to the point of obsession, but we should learn it and understand it well enough to avoid mistakes made countless times in the past.  But then, ignoring history is one of those ancient and cyclical mistakes.

The cynical part of me wants to say we will fail.  It wants to say that we will bring the world into a second Dark Age, that all knowledge and wisdom from our ancestors will vanish, having been lost with us.  But there is a part of me that still hopes; hopes for us to learn, to be enlightened.  It hopes that my generation will usher in an age of tolerance, compassion, and understanding.