The Generational Decline

There was once a time when there were philosophers. I think these are people who didn’t have facebook or twitter or youtube to occupy their afternoons and nights, so they had to find something to do with their time. And because vacationing to other countries means months of travel, they resorted to thinking. Do you remember thinking? It is when you do nothing and let your mind work or maybe even play.

We don’t have the luxury of thinking now. We are too busy describing what we’re doing on twitter to think. Usually, we spend our time thinking of how we can humorously describe what we’re doing so we can tweet it.

I am an avid follower of news. Quite recently, I’ve been following the Republican primaries for the United States Presidential nomination. They have a lot of brilliant candidates but let’s face it, they don’t have a Ronald Reagan in the primaries. By that, I mean there is lack of candidate who the entire party can really rally behind. It is so divisive rather than unifying. I think, they are only unified by their dissatisfaction of the status quo.

But that is virtually the same with people around the world. Here in the Philippines, a President won because his mother died and we felt sorry for their family. Now, he is doing such a great job doing what he did when he was a Senator – nothing. He is basically out on a vendetta against his predecessor to overshadow the fact that his people are still hungry and jobless but paying high taxes in a third world country.

Greece and Italy had leadership changes when the Euro crisis hit. But people are still displeased after the change in leadership. It seems no one can really unify people anymore.

But admittedly, the generation of these politicians belong to an earlier one than ours. But why is there such a vacuum of admirable leaders out there? Even in schools, council elections are failing.

Is it possible that as generation pass by, people think less and less? Is it possible that the younger the generation is, the less it care about the world? We don’t need to go far. Our grand parents lived a different life than our parents. We are living a different life than our parents. Our younger brothers and sisters live a life more different than ours. But it seems as technology has advanced, our way of thinking has gone backwards.

We can take social media everywhere we go. That is primary concern: being sociable. That’s our nature; we are social beings. But we are forgetting what separated us from other beings; we are also sentient beings. We rationalize. We reason. But nowadays, we can find more rational octopi than we can rational kids running around in schools. An octopus can get out of a complicated maze without GPS. Our kids will probably get lost or give up.

Being advance in technology does not mean we are smarter than our predecessors. Knowing more does not make us smarter than them. We did not reach this stage without the collective knowledge of those who came before us.

What if our generation is the first generation to have ever lived? Where would we be now?