Advice from Gen Z, How to Build a Culture, and Why We Need Shame
Excerpts, links, and recommendations.
Hello Bar-setters!
I have some great links and recommendations for today, as well as a thought from me. Right to it!
What Gen Z Young-Adults Wish Their Parents Had Done
Dr. Jonathan Haidt has begun a fantastic series called Voices of Gen Z. This fantastic piece comes from Rikki Schlott, the Gen Z co-author of The Cancelling of the American Mind.
A couple excerpts:
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from talking to my fellow Zoomers, it’s that we almost unanimously recognize the damage our smartphones have done. I’ve never heard someone say, “I still hate my mom for not letting me get a phone until I was 13.”
My suggestion: delay. Wait until high school to give them a phone. (As Jon recommends, you can give them a flip phone before that.) Wait even longer to let them have an Instagram or TikTok account. The resentment is temporary. They’ll thank you later.
I still hold out hope that parents, educators, researchers, and Zoomers can work together to reconfigure technology’s role in childhood.
We were the guinea pigs of the digital age. Our suffering should inspire solutions, lest it be in vain.
And this:
Gen Z has inherited a post-hope world, stripped of what matters. Instead, we have been offered a smorgasbord of easy and unsatisfying substitutes.
All the things that have traditionally made life worth living — love, community, country, faith, work, and family — have been “debunked.”
Sentiments I hear often from peers:
Love — “Monogamy is so outdated.”
Community — “I have enough friends online.”
Country — “I’m embarrassed to be an American.”
Work — “I’m quiet-quitting.”
Family — “I’m not bringing kids into this melting world.”
Faith — “My parents are such naive Bible thumpers. By the way, what’s your star sign?”
Everything that matters has been devalued for Zoomers, leaving behind a generation with gaping holes where the foundations of a meaningful life should be. They’re desperately grasping for alternative purpose-making systems, all of which fall short.
How to Build a Culture of Heroes, Solidarity, and Meaning
Read this amazing piece. It details the heroic response of Israeli citizens and what Israel has done to create such a strong, connected culture at a time when most other affluent nations are crippled by loneliness, self-obsession, and despair.
This reminded me of a great quote from Alexandra Hudson’s new book, The Soul of Civility:
In many ways these challenges—new technologies, disrupted social life, the seduction of presentism (or the uncritical assumption that the present is all that matters), materialism, political division—among others have always been with us in some form or another. Yet they insidiously affect our lives, clouding our ability to appreciate the fragility of our civilization, our social fabric, the bonds of community, and the inherent dignity of the human person. They overwhelm us as we become desensitized to their malignant effects.
For the Sake of Your Kids, Let’s Bring Back Judgment
I’ll end with the fantastic Robert K. Henderson, who I featured a couple weeks back, as well.
… negative social judgments serve as guardrails to deter detrimental decisions that lead to unhappiness.
To avoid misery we have to admit that certain actions and choices are actually in and of themselves undesirable—fatherlessness, obesity, substance abuse, crime, and so on—and not simply in need of normalization.
Indeed, it’s cruel to validate decisions that inflict harm, especially on those who had no hand in the decision—like young children.
If you like this vein, check out chapter 9 of my book, which I titled: Judge Thy Neighbor.
The Abolition of Man
If you are digging this vein, I bet you’d love C.S. Lewis’s classic, The Abolition of Man. Here is a great podcast about this work:
A final thought from me…
Where does our culture come from?
Where does the culture that your children adopt, thus creating their worldview and beliefs— where does that come from?
Most moderns have become comfortable with the idea that we the parents and the broader community do not set the culture (evidence). It isn’t the parents, the community, or the nation-state that intentionally sets out to embed a cultural value system. Rather, we concede that our children will, predominantly, inherit their worldview, values, and beliefs from the media, marketers, and pop-culture icons that they and their peers choose.
This is the inevitable consequence of mass media and mass moral relativism, but, historically, that worldview would have been seen as insane. Culturally, that is suicide.
The take home message: churches, schools, and parents must be much more intentional about clarifying what matters. There is no neutral. We have to fill in a strong culture for our children or other forces will.
Thank you for reading and sharing with anyone you think would find this interesting!
Carry the fire!
Shane