Do not let your children use cell phones until they are 16 years old, warns an expert, I imagine aware of the laughter that his words will provoke in so many parents who deal daily with those beings with grim looks, prolonged silences and a phone magnetized to their hand 24 hours a day. Because smartphones have become the true space of their existence, their data center and their emotional command. In a monumental door to astonishment, but also to inconsequentiality. And to the algorithm, which personalizes your banquet of desires. Mobile phone addiction is the drug of our time. The most powerful. The one that can make us crazy with its immediacy and its unlimited supply of sensations.
Today, when TikTok videos replace every book, reading comprehension falls precipitously among a generation trained to LOL, who writes and repeats just to agree, unable to express a feeling without a string of kissing emojis. The digital instruction of our young people coincides with our feeling of defeat, the impotence of an infertile combat already clarified, because we don't let go of the phone either.
Few millennials and centennials will inherit our tastes, and that is not significant. But what was valued higher for us (such as knowledge or effort) is for most kids synonymous with anxiety or boredom. I think of the devaluation of culture based on Machado's Alexandrian verse: “And in the end, I owe you nothing; "You owe me everything I have written." How the young Bizarrap worshipers would laugh at him! What can they owe to a poet, even to a thinker? “I'm sorry,” they repeat, challenging the norms of a society that has ended up replacing punishment with negotiation and, even so, it doesn't work out.
In Spain, vocational training enrollments – which are finally beginning to lose their pejorative odor – have grown by 68% over the last decade. Adolescents do not dream of the university as a temple in which to obtain their intellectual emancipation because they have witnessed the disaster of their older brothers, graduates and masters, who make up that 27.1% of youth unemployment.
The formation of a critical spirit has dissolved as a purpose, and immaturity is established in the long term. No, we did not know how to transmit one of the maxims of the Enlightenment: “Sapere aude” – “dare to use your understanding”, as Kant repeated – because we were too focused on achieving everything, paying the bills and not losing our jobs.
The engagement of young people in the virtual world challenges us as a society: what have we done wrong? Technology has shown us shortcuts, but it has shortened our horizon. The greater the progress, the less intellectual ambition among those who will rule the planet in 20 years. According to a survey by the Center d'Estudis d'Opinió of the Generalitat, what matters most to Catalan youth is having a home and a job. They are interested in feminism and ecology, however they are opposed to independence. Projecting your identity as adults throws up many unknowns.
They may surpass us in different capacities despite not having set foot in a faculty nor caring about who Machado or Kant were. Every time, absorbed in a screen, they say “I don't care,” it has nothing to do with that Bartlebyan rebellion of “I'd rather not do it,” but with an unconscious renunciation of any responsibility.
