My interactions with young people are admittedly limited.
Outside of my own kids, I make it a rule to avoid kids. I am not a fan. They tend to be messy with something either leaking or needing wiping or some other biohazard. I have also noticed that young adults, say post 20 years, struggle with personal interaction. The lost art of conversation I think can be attributed to screen time and phones. One of the skills that young people can learn is asking someone authentic questions about their life. A more developed inquiry than civility reveals a true desire to connect on a conversational level.
Think about it, when we were growing up we had to ask questions to figure out what was going on in someone else’s life. We could not reduce a human being to an Instagram or Facebook status as a way to summarize someone’s life. We had to ask them what they actually ate for breakfast because there was not a site to see what they posted for breakfast. Furthermore, when you talk to people now there is a tendency to get what I like to refer to as simple post answers, a homogenized sanitized version of events crafted to mute a reaction.
I mean the topics we can discuss in polite society are quickly being eliminated. Politics is out, sports are too controversial questions such as, how are you? no reason to respond because I can check your status. What have you been doing? A mundane lame question I should refrain from asking because I can check online to see what idiotic action you just posted 2 minutes ago. We can assume that a human being’s scope of responses can be entirely captured in 140 characters. All of these shortcuts and edits eliminate the ability of people to formulate in depth responses that help us connect in meaningful ways.
I guess another advancement in our technical world is the lost art of conversation.
Albert R. Hartley