As you age, you begin to see trends. Not the fads you saw in youth, but actual trends. They’re like fads but over long spans and incorporating them as well. They’re longer-form gravitations toward ideals. Cyclical recurrences of formerly-existent-but-now-refined ideas.
And the fact is, the vast majority of the first-gen postdigital kids (millennials?) are a bunch of weird creatures.
That’s not to say bad. Never mistake weird for bad. Gates was weird. Think he had it easy before he was making money? No way, man. He was fucking weird. Jobs was weird until he died. It was why he died; rejecting medical treatment in place of home-remedies and warm thoughts.
Fucking weird.
And it doesn’t just extend to intelligence types– though some call Jobs a con-artist before an innovator. That he was likely both is neither here nor there, as everyone’s the same in most ways. It’s merely context that changes. Humans have to be to survive. That’s Humanity. It’s adaptation. It’s Evolution; finding ways to thrive despite extreme, organic adversity.
Do not deny it’s truth. Rather, revel in it; first-gen postdigital kids, (millennials) are the weird generation.
Probably ‘cause we’re all prototypes raised dyslexic on television-frames and text flashing by at light-speed. By the time we’d finally taken our Ritalin and calmed down, it was lunch time and recess. After that, we came in exhausted, completely unaware of the world we were actually experiencing.
Once we came of age, we decided to slow down. Entirely.
Our generation has come to a screeching halt. Not only because of the economy, and external factors, which press in at us with each moment; but because of the sheer want to finally experience something without being forced through it.
This will hit deeper for some than others, but all of you know what I mean:
I recall being educated, but I do not recall my education.
A simple, yet resonant sentiment.
Thousands of years ago, when humans were first socializing into groups more complex than tribes, education was imparted through the same trial-error-observation platform used by all of science today. It was interpersonal in nature, but it was the same, conceptual idea.
Science as it is known today did not exist then. It could not. Not enough reference of civilization– or history– existed yet to be acted on by the call-function.
But now, times have changed. Technology has hurled us headlong. At speeds even we can’t comprehend. The issue is one of grasp; having any on the matters at-hand. As a civilization, Humanity is completely unprepared for the social requirements of a next-level society.
This is bad. Potentially, catastrophically so.
Historically, the less socially-prepared a civilization is to endure a change, the more likely it is to utterly collapse. Ultimately, Rome’s collapse was seeded by its inability to get anything done. Its politics and civics, until then its greatest strengths, began to collapse under the weight of their maintainers’ ignorance.
An innocent ignorance, to be certain, but one all the same. Worse, one no less harmful for it.
Likewise, the same is evident in Central and South Americas cultures whose great achievements rival that of the Pyramids. Ultimately, their culture died from failing to accept the very people they bled for the gods were the ones building their temples.
Eventually, something had to give. So it did. Simple as that.
Unfortunately, it also took with it much collected knowledge in the crossfire. Of all ancient cultures only the Egyptian knowledge is best kept, but notice their name absent above. Though the aforementioned are hardly the extent of cases, they are ideologically different. Egypt did not fall. It ceded its cultural prowess to Rome.
True, it did so largely as a result of decline, one culture’s decline is eternally another’s rise. A sentient species cannot exist culture-less. As postdigital humans can no longer exist information-less. Thus, culture moves always. And like all things, along paths of least resistance– and much too fast for any pre-digital age record-keeping methods.
It is only the postdigital world that can reconcile this; by becoming one culture, unified and constantly changing together.
S. M. Nolan's Sci-Fi Logbook 