2012-12-30

I Want to Have Children Because It's Convenient

List all the things that are convenient now-a-days: Fast food, Facebook, taking airplanes, Google, the pizza delivery man, Wikipedia. Name some others. We live in a fast paced world where everything is at our fingertips. This is now inter-generational. Generation Y and Yi are living the most convenient life in the history of man. Should they be proud? When my generation looks at itself in the mirror what does it see? I see a person that thinks they know something about the world because they did a Google search about “knowing something about the world.” Things are not so easy. Things are not so convenient.

I was a participant in a lecture that discussed generational differences in the workplace. I was born in 1987, which makes me generation Y. According to the research, generation Y has a great sense of entitlement and they give superiors respect only when its earned. Generation Y is a bunch of hoodlums. The digital age has spawned something that I don’t think generation X or generation Y saw coming: that the fruits of the greatest generation would spoil. And spoiled rotten they are.

What has been passed down from generation to generation is something we should pay greater attention to. For me, I am concerned about my own children and the generation they will grow up in. Imagine fifth graders twenty years from now. They will have a gmail, a Facebook profile, an Instagram account, and they won’t be able to stop tweeting every thing they do. This is before they become teenagers. They will spend a great amount of time writing 140 characters or less and searching for a punch line for their status update. Gone are the days of lol and haha and instead sentences become a series of acronyms and emoticons: wyd lmfao smh :) ttysot. Huh?

Convenience does not just extend itself to “social” skills. What type of food will there be in the future? In America we have already made it likely that generation Yi will either have cancer, diabetes, or psychological problems. We manufacture sugar filled food to put in carcinogenic packaging or in some type of hormone disrupting bottle and we wonder why kids are popping pills because they can’t concentrate or want to fight Timmy uncontrollably. The convenient life is not a healthy life and at times should not be considered living at all.

What things are being passed down that actually mean something? What are we giving to the next generation that is not something that makes something else more convenient? This is not just something that is occurring in big cities, it’s happening in small towns as well. It is across the board. The old parental adage goes, “we want the best for our children.” What does that even mean? Next time you hear that or say it yourself, define what that actually is. What is the best for our children?

I will close with one last thing. The greatest impact in my life was my Dad taking me to get breakfast everyday during my fifth grade year to teach me something new. I learned about Martin Luther, how to multiply numbers in different ways, and how to appreciate learning. That is what drives me, that is what I remember, and that is what shapes who I am. I don’t care about how fun Madden ‘02 was when it came out or how Sega Genesis had cool graphics when you played Sonic and Tails. That was easy and it was convenient. But it wasn’t meaningful. Take a look at the headline now. Fill in the blank. I want to have children because ___.