Since communication is one of my interest areas, lately, I have read a few articles from different sources about the growing lack of communication skills in young people which reinforces my own predictions from many years ago, and growing observations. As I see it, as we have become increasingly separated by screens and driven by self-centred desire, we are losing our interpersonal skills, and rather than asking, we are demanding.
I say we, because it is happening in all age groups.
But the young are the worst.
Because they have grown up in a set of conditions where they have had everything available, on-demand, and whatever content they want, they can access. They have also been raised in an environment where they have been emotionally wrapped in cottonwool and taught to express their feelings unreservedly, regardless of the consequences or impacts on others. In someway, this could be seen as honesty, but when feelings themselves go unvalidated and can be triggered by untruths, it is harmful.
If you talk to a lot of young people and read the way they are behaving, they will talk about "creating boundaries" in their lives which pretty much always comes down to doing and getting more of what they want. In the workplace, it means doing less work. In relationships, it becomes the tyranny of dictators, demanding that whoever they interact with, does so in a way that they get their needs fulfilled, without offence.
Boundary or Barrier?
Take yourself back to childhood. Think of all the things that you didn't like, but you like now. Perhaps it was certain vegetables, or a type of drink. Maybe it was spicy food. It could have been certain sports, or even preferred looks. And then also think of all the "I will never" comments you made that you ended up doing later in life, and enjoying.
Imagine all of those were your boundaries to future experience.
The thing with all of these boundaries that people are making, is that they are often based of non-existent or narrow experience, assumptions and misunderstandings. And what people are doing is burning their bridges to future possibility, creating barriers to different experiences. Young people are making judgements from a very limited understanding about what is important and how they will feel about things in the future, narrowing their potential and reducing the relationships that could possibly enrich their experience later.
There is a cost to action.
While it might be healthy to develop boundaries, part of maturity is actually about testing boundaries. It is about expansion, while creating boundaries is about limitation. And a lot of people are limiting themselves based on some pretty poor information that is coming from their peer group, who is also inexperienced. It is like a fifteen year old listening to another fifteen year old about how to cope with a breakup.
The blind leading the blind.
Abd it isn't that older people know better per se, because that isn't always the case, because it is going to similarly depend on the experience of the person. I know people who are in their thirties who have never been in a serious relationship, never gone through a breakup, yet believe that they are authorities on relationships. I also know people in their thirties and forties who have never held a full-time job, struggle to make ends meet, and live off their parents. Do you take career advice from that person?
The thing is, building wisdom (timely knowledge + practical skill), takes experience. But if setting up barriers to get that very experience takes precedent in order to make the world more comfortable now, it means foregoing future possibility for immediate emotional safety. The thing with emotional safety is, the more one acquires it, the less safe the world becomes. The best way to make life comfortable, is to learn how to deal with discomfort, not reduce discomforts until the body is so soft everything presses into it and creates an uncomfortable environment.
But the bubble world the younger generations have been raised into, has been a place where they are able to choose their surroundings and inevitably and with the reduction in random events, they are choosing where they feel good. But that bubble is not reality when dealing with a wide range of people, like in the workplace. This means that when random interactions with a range of undesirable personalities becomes the norm, the discomfort trigger fires and they are looking to create another boundary, another fence. They think they are keeping the bad out, but what they are actually doing is locking themselves in.
It is important that we set healthy boundaries for ourselves in life. But it is even more important that we have the type of experience we need in order to choose and build those boundaries in a way that we are empowered, rather than disenfranchised. This is not what most people are doing now though, as instead of understanding the environment, they are only looking at it all from their perspective and as if they are in a vacuum that is entitled to provision and support.
Tyrannical.
And tyrants inevitably end up deposed.
And I think that we can see this in the way that so many young people are struggling with a multitude of mental health issues, as they look to label their condition to explain why they feel the way they feel - rather looking at the role that they themselves played in painting themselves into a corner through all of their demands, boundaries, and unwillingness to compromise on their own desires.
I am finally starting to see a little pushback on some of the nonsense that has driven us into these situations, but it is very soft and it is often shouted down or dismissed. But in time, my hope is that we as a society will stop looking to limit ourselves and maintain the status quo that we are weak, and instead start expanding ourselves again and becoming more comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty in our world.
As it is only the unknown, that new solutions can be found.
Taraz
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