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How can we think about our experience as thinkers these days? And how tightly do we have to define who is doing the thinking?
Consider the now-iconic image of a 10-year-old sitting at her desk with music on, the TV muted in front of her, playing a video game, monitoring a chat-thread, and talking on the telephone. She insists that she’s attending well within her comfort and ability.
The average Baby Boomer, often the grandparent, sees this tableau and is usually unable to feel it as anything other than a jumble of irreconcilable stimuli erecting a wall of sound between that 10-year-old and her own internal experience. And then, of course, most parents focus first on how hard it is to break through.
But what if that child’s actions are her self-training, her innervation of a brain that will live in a matrix of stimuli and feedback, sorting among the incoming for whatever is at the living, growing edge of her own consciousness? She may have created a short-cut through what we, her elders, tend to think of as some of life’s hardest work.
“Oh no!” the elders retort. “There are no short cuts! You get what you pay for! There’s no free lunch! A penny saved is a penny earned! What’s been true for eons is still true, human beings are cursed with the pains of labor and the dread of our ultimate limits. And besides, life has been tough for me,” they continue, “why should a network of electrified connections change any brain process so quickly and easily for them?” Ahem.
No one likes to be on the drag side of change.
It is a short-cut in the same sense that a lot of the cognitive tasks that older generations are still doing laboriously are ones that the echo-Boom already apparently does quite naturally. The older among us tend to feel like we’re wading through it all, batting back the cheap marketing ploys and intimidation, leaping piles of advertising dross in a single bound, bravely charting our course through the day to avoid the yawning pit of YouTube or shotgun blasts of Twitter.
Maybe that short-cut is inconceivable to us because we’re still writing that story, clinging to the unitary identity – with the occasional erratum – that we’ve told all these years.
The stories younger people are writing don’t appear to be The Hero’s Journey at all (see Our Stories About Ourselves). They’re The Hero’s Cuddle or the Hero’s Flashmob. Ok, I’ll stop being flip; yes, they do work hard at building identities. But their work involves, in part, a kind of serial reassembly which happens more quickly, playfully, with less at risk than that of previous generations. There is probably some overarching reassurance, of which they are constantly reminded, that they are part of immediate groups, of each other, and in ways that really seem new. Sure, they’re invested in themselves and their personal development but somehow the bet is hedged; they have more degrees of freedom (more about that later).
As a generation, the echo-Boom seem unusually resilient and flexible if:
- they’ve grown up with access to the tools that allow them to experiment in this way
- their education has also had some emotional sophistication.
Big provisos. And maybe I’m fooling myself. But I’m certainly not the first to propose these ideas.
As many of the newly launched are working for the salvation of life as we know it, some of their anxiety, grief, and apprehension about a possibly collapsing ecology and a tumbling economy may be distributed into a much larger, shared pool. Is it a sense of resignation? Of denial? A way to take comfort in numbers … of themselves?
They are in it together. And they ARE it together. Communicating, thinking, and sharing for so many of their waking hours.
Maybe what they’ve done is ramped up the speed and variation of a developmental process that produces a more flexible, resourceful,and efficient member of a group. Maybe they are a group evolving and problem solving more and better.
If this sounds like you or someone you know, or if you have another experience, leave a comment.
There’s just one of me here writing.
