thinking about how in ancient times, at least people knew that the lives their children would lead would….vaguely resemble their own???
People have always fondly reminisced about The Good Old Days and complained about Kids These Days, of course. But—and I cannot stress this enough—when my mom was born the Internet did not exist.
like I’m thinking about how I am a college student and during the pandemic, work, education, and relationships have been almost totally dependent on a network of technology that literally did not exist when my parents were college students.
When my mom was in college, she just wouldn’t have been capable of predicting what college would be like for me. I took a full semester of college from 5 hours away because I can virtually attend class through a pocket sized device that projects my image and voice into a shared virtual classroom where I can interact with my professor and other students. I wrote research papers without physical access to a library because I could read my college library’s books on my computer.
If you’re a Mesopotamian farmer, hitching his oxen to a plow, like…idk, man. I can’t picture myself at 40. I feel like a Mesopotamian farmer, trying to imagine his sons riding John Deeres.
It’s so persistently portrayed as this eternal, cyclical thing: Get a job, buy a house, get married and have kids, save for their college, send them off to college. This is the cycle of life. 2.5 kids, buy a house, have a steady career. Just as your father before you did, and his father before him.
Except they didn’t. His father before him didn’t do this, and your son will not live like you. This is not enshrined in tradition. This is not life. This is not how things are, or have been, or how they ever been. Look at it. This beautiful, ageless world of saving for your kids’ college and paying off mortgages and nuclear families. There is no way of life to pass down to your children, no tradition, nothing your father gave you that you can give to your son! You were born into a world that is unintelligible and inaccessible to the children you wanted to inherit it, and you and your children will both die in a world that is as foreign to you both!
I don’t envy the Boomer generation, nor do I have some kind of conceited disdain for them for not being able to adapt to now. So, so much of what defines our lives happened for the first time in their lifetime, and the absence of those things cannot be explained to us. Do you remember what it was like before television? Well…what is “it?”
It’s like our generation’s dim memory of childhood before Internet, and the vast, panicky knowledge that our childhoods were mostly full of a quality best described as the absence of internet, and there is no way to transmit that idea to the kids of today or explain it. We remember it, so, so clearly. It was real. But it’s gone. Annihilated.
There’s a midrash that before he died, Moses was worried about what would become of the Israelite people after he was gone. God brought him forward in time to the schoolhouse of Rabbi Akiva. Moses listened to the discussion but could not understand a thing, and nearly despaired, until he heard a student ask Akiva, “how did you arrive at this conclusion?” Akiva responded, “it follows from what Moses taught.” Reassured, Moses returned to his own time and died.
I taught this midrash last week to a class of about ten 3rd-8th graders whom I have been teaching since September and have never met in person. I asked them to continue the midrash: if Moses made a second stop in 2021, what would confuse him, and what would reassure him?
The youngest kids had a fantastic time imagining Moses trying to use an iPad, trying to understand that he was in a classroom, that we were doing remotely what he had seen Akiva do in person. The older kids wondered if he would be astonished at our level of literacy, or our coed learning.
When I asked what would reassure him they were momentarily stumped: it wasn’t the first time this group has struggled to identify positives about their lives and experiences, except in a guilty “some people have it worse” kind of way. I reminded them of what reassured Moses in the schoolhouse of Akiva: knowing that what he taught had evolved from rather than superseded the traditions of our ancestors. “Who are we learning about right this very minute?” I prompted.
One of them acted it out: Moses peering suspiciously at his iPad, then exclaiming, “They’re learning my Torah in there!” We are not unmoored, we are evolving. It is easier to see the changes than the things that remain constant, but I think there is value, whatever your cultural tradition, in asking “what would reassure my ancestors?”
“The children are using this vast, incomprehensible magical network to mock that damned Ea-Nasir and his terrible copper. Good.”
i love to think about how my ipad holds vastly more knowledge than was available to sumerians in 2000 bce, but if one of them saw me scribble away on it with my stylus, they would know what it is! from 4000 years across history, they would recognize this object if they saw me use it! and maybe they’d say ‘you know, we use something like this where i’m from’. and i’d say ‘i know. in school we learn that you invented them.’ and in a weird, convoluted, wonderful and very comforting sense, they invented my ipad too.
I love this conversation…. the whole thread, the things which are spoken about, with no insults or disdain: an open view of life as it is now.
“I don’t envy the Boomer generation, nor do I have some kind of conceited disdain for them for not being able to adapt to now”
I suppose I am a Boomer. Not a word I like, because of the way it is usually used, to shut down conversation….in in this conversation, used in the opposite way. Inclusive. Not telling me to be quiet, that I coukdnt possibly understand…..
I remember b/w tv, with only two channels. No internet or computers. Music was on 45 (single)or 33(LP….vinyl making its comeback, slightly ironic, I think) When I was a teacher, copies were made by scratching what you wanted printed into a wax covered paper, then sent to be printed.
And I love the Moses midrash. I find it very comforting….thank you, @meirmakesstuff
So, I’m old(er), but the first to admit, very definitely not wiser. I have my own set of difficulties and issues – some things are very different than when I was growing up: part of the reason for me not coming out as non binary and bisexual till recently. I don’t think the word ‘non binary’ existed then.
i think “video games aren’t really the violent child-corrupting threat some parents worry they are” and “certain circles of gamer culture are incredibly toxic and can lead people down dangerous/hateful ideological rabbit holes” are ideas that can absolutely coexist
this and also “videogame violence can have affects on people” (as in– see the way the military uses call of duty as recruitment tools, look at the way war games are designed to whitewash history and remove american war crimes) but that doesn’t literally equal “I played a violent game and now I’m going to go shoot people”.
Tumblr really needs to find a middle ground between “any contact between an adult and a non-blood-related youth is inherently predatory” and “being creepy towards children and teens is fine actually” or we are gonna end up w an entire generation of ppl w brain rot.
I was a child and a teen once. I was also a nanny for a number of years to older children. Children and teens can have perfectly normal interactions with grown folks that aren’t either
A. Predatory OR
B. Incredibly infantilizing to the point of insulting an older child or teen’s intelligence and being disrespectful of their rights
Because I have a life offline and a job where most of my co-workers are teens, I can assure you, based on observational evidence, that teens do not like to be treated like they are fragile babies but without a fucking brain and are, in fact, a little put off by adults who treat them as such.
I would also like you to stop and consider that maybe telling a child or teen in a vulnerable situation where they are, for example, being abused by a trusted adult (i.e. a parent) that ALL adults are exactly like their abusers and cannot be trusted because no relationship with an adult is healthy IS ACTUALLY REALLY FUCKING DAMAGING
ifesbob 