Turn on any TV show featuring young people. Watch the legions of panting blonde mannequins who adhere to the current rules for making men desire them: Empty your brain of thoughts, fill your chest with saline, and pretend physical attraction is respect. Observe the ranks of posturing mindless male dummies who think manhood is machismo and social status is akin to divinity.
A permissive culture inundated with sex and violence is not the problem. I see the issue as one of self-worth. Kids today are growing up thinking that their only personal value lies in their sexuality. For them, this translates to how attractive they are to the opposite gender, how cool they look and sound, and how trendy their clothes are. They invest all of their time, energy, and resources into these goals. As a result, they’re destroying their individuality. They’re remaking themselves into what they expect others will want.
Young people today think their tan is indicative of how hard they work in life. They don’t understand the difference between beauty and sexuality. Young women earn self-esteem from how many men get an erection from looking at them; the young men get it by one-upping their buddies in bragging contests. These kids don’t have a clue about who they want to be because they can’t figure out who they are. They’re too busy stressing over how to get someone to like them or be attracted to them. They’re selling their metaphorical souls to Eva Longoria and Kanye West.
I’ve said it before; the problem with the culture is that it’s teaching the kids to be shallow. Everything stems from that. Shallow kids can’t define themselves except by how “hot” they are, and so they have no self-respect and no responsibility. They have nothing but the illusion of free will, when the reality is that they’re trying desperately to abolish all their free will for trend. They’d rather be vapid and hot than interesting and obscure. This is a surrender of everything that makes your life worthwhile. This is death.
To succeed in transforming these kids from automatons into real people, they must become aware of the problem. They must be told that their cup size, designer clothing, and car will not give them happiness or value. They must realize that a tanned six-pack won’t make them better people. Talking and behaving like their favorite rapper or starlet will not reveal any mysteries about life. They need to be told that they’re acting dumb, and they need to be ashamed of that.
The obstacle is that advice is generally wasted on the young. I thought that similar things were important when I was a kid, and I didn’t listen to anyone. Indeed, maybe a refusal to take advice from authority figures – even if it’s good advice – is about the only independent thing of which the youth are capable.
It’s a little amazing – and perhaps a little humiliating – when you wake up one day and realize that social status is a joke, and only the truly moronic and depthless think it’s amusing past the age of about nineteen. Trust me, kids, there is nothing important whatsoever in how cool you look, how socially acceptable you are, or how many people of the opposite gender you’ve banged. That stuff only matters if you make it matter. It’s an opinion, and opinions are usually worth exactly zero. The sooner you realize this, the sooner you can start doing what actually matters in life: being yourself.
