Don't let your children use mobile phones until they are 16, warns an expert, I imagine that aware of the laughter that his words will provoke in so many parents who battle daily with those beings with wild eyes, prolonged silences and a magnetized phone in the on hand 24 hours a day. Because smartphones have become the true space of their existence, their data center and emotional command. In a monumental it leads to surprise, but also to insignificance. And to the algorithm, which personalizes your banquet of desires. Cell phone addiction is the drug of our time. The most powerful The one that can place to the point of making us go crazy with its immediacy and the unlimited supply of sensations.
Today, when TikTok videos replace any book, reading comprehension plummets among a LOL-trained generation that writes without orthography and repeats just to nod, unable to express a feeling without a rake of kissing emojis. The digital instruction of our young people coincides with our feeling of defeat, the impotence of an infertile battle has already been clarified, because we also do not let go of the phone.
Few millennials and centennials will inherit our tastes, and that's not significant. But what used to go up for us – like knowledge or effort – is for most guys synonymous with anxiety or boredom. I think of the devaluation of culture from Machado's Alexandrian verse: “Y al cabo, nada os debo; debéisme cuanto I escrito". How the young worshipers of Bizarrap would laugh at it! What can they owe to a poet, even a thinker? "Me la bufa", they repeat in defiance of the norms of a society that has ended up replacing punishment with negotiation and, even so, it doesn't pay off.
In Spain, vocational training enrollments – which are finally beginning to lose their pejorative tuff – have grown by 68% over the last decade. Teenagers do not dream of the university as a temple where they can obtain intellectual emancipation because they have witnessed the disaster of their older brothers, graduates and masters, who make up 27.1% of youth unemployment.
The formation of a critical spirit has dissolved as a purpose, and immaturity sets in for the long term. No, we didn't know how to convey one of the maxims of the Enlightenment: "Sapere aude" - "dare to use your understanding", as Kant repeated - because we were too focused on getting everything, paying the bills and not lose your job.
The addiction of our young people to the virtual world challenges us as a society: what have we done wrong? Technology has shown us shortcuts, but it has also shortened our horizon. The more progress, the less intellectual ambition among those who will rule the planet twenty years from now. According to a survey by the Center for Opinion Studies of the Generalitat, what matters most to Catalan youth is having a home and a job. They are interested in feminism and ecology, but are opposed to independence.
Projecting your identity as adults presents many unknowns. It may be that they surpass us in different capacities despite not having set foot in a faculty and without caring who Machado or Kant was. Now, every time, engrossed in a screen, they say "I'm blowing everything", it has nothing to do with that Bartlebian rebellion of "I'd rather not do it" but with an unconscious resignation of any responsibility.
