Our Kid's Brave New World

Saturday afternoon we took our niece and nephew, Ava and Hunter to the airport to send them back home after a 4-day stint at Chez Lancito.  Ava is 13 and Hunter is 9.  These are a couple of kids who I am guessing are typical of their age group, although I am positive they are in the highest percentile with regard to intelligence and awareness of the world around them.  Their parents are very bright and accomplished and these kids benefit from all the right things when it comes to parenting.

I was amazed by them for several reasons, but one reason prominently.  I was fascinated by the amount of time they spent involved with their ‘screens’.  I don’t hang out with kids this age very often, but I am astounded to say that Hunter spent about 75% of his awake hours either looking at his phone screen or the television, sometimes both simultaneously.  Ava is an avid reader, so most of her unengaged time with us was spent reading, but she also spent her 50% of her remaining time engaged with her phone.   Hunter was always playing one of perhaps 50-100 computer games stored on his phone; texting to his parents; talking with his parents, or watching animated television.

It occurred to me that we have a population of young people that most likely experience 50% of their lives or more with their attention riveted to fantasy spaces and environments.  That means they spend 50% or more time NOT tuned in to the real world—reality—nature—human interaction.  What kind of people will they be as adults?  Perhaps much of what we may suffer as a society with regard to division, violence, ‘otherness’, may be due to the increasing attention these young people pay to situations of violence, competition, destruction, etc. that are the embodiment of these fantasy game environments portrayed in their gaming lives. 

And I am not sure there is any solution for it other than to simply stop our children from spending time engaged there.  We may just be evolving into a species that is going to be very different from what our parents were as children, and for me that is a society placed squarely in the 40s and 50s.  What will that mean for the concepts of empathy, community, cooperation, competition, etc.?

It also occurs to me that we may be the last generation to be able to recall that much simpler life experience, where friends would spend time talking, playing physical games, and generally messing around in our physical reality.  Not the ‘Hunters’ of our current world….they are in fantasy places for huge amounts of their day.

Anyway, we got to the airport early because they were traveling as unaccompanied minors, and there are lots of rules and procedures we had to follow to make sure they arrived safely.  So we sat down in the gate area of their flight and Hunter whipped out his phone and called up Scrabble, which we decided we would play as teams: boys against the girls.  Ava and Cecily vs. me and Hunter.    

In the ‘in between’ times while the girls were contemplating their word choices, Hunter tried to engage me in one of many games on his phone where I needed to kill the most characters in a time limit, or had to make the head explode on his character before his character could make my character’s head explode.  I was inept!  I couldn’t even begin to match his dexterity, reflexes and reactions using the electronic controls.  I consider myself pretty ‘tech’ savvy for my 71 years, but I was no match for Hunter.  I probably wouldn’t even be able to match his skill even with weeks of practice.  Hunter was frustrated by my lack of proficiency, and pretty much gave up on me after a few minutes.  Mercifully, the girls completed their turn and I was able to escape further embarrassment. 

We went first in the Scrabble game, and after about 4 or 5 rounds the score was 112 for me and Hunter and 111 for Ava and Cecily.  At that moment the gate agent called us up over the PA system for pre-boarding and check-in.  With the game only in its earliest stages, we had to abandon the play. 

So I declared the boys the winners since after 5 rounds we were 1 point ahead.  The girls objected vociferously because they claimed we had used 2 of the game’s “best choice” options when we were stumped in trying to find a word to use.  The electronic Scrabble game offers 4 uses of that ‘helper option’ to each player if they are stumped.

I countered with, “Hey those options are part of the game and we shouldn’t be penalized for using them.  You cannot claim ‘foul’ just because we used them and you didn’t.  The numbers don’t lie!  We won with the most points!”

They argued that we had played unfairly, and they should win because their effort was real effort as opposed to our use of a crutch.  I drew the analogy of the 2016 elections to their attention, which they did not appreciate at all!  I said, “Hey listen, you may think you played with the most integrity (won the popular vote), but we got the most points (won the electoral college vote), so too bad.  They threatened to appeal to the rule makers of the game(provide Congressional oversight), and I taunted them by telling them they could always impeach us!  I couldn’t believe I was trying to justify my ‘Trumpian’ position!!

We all howled!

I was impressed with their awareness of the current political milieu to the extent that they understood the analogy.

My takeaway from all this is that our young people are going to be much different from the way we are (the ‘we’ being the Baby Boomer generation).  My only hope is that somehow they will absorb enough of the ideals and aspirations of us older peeps to keep our world from becoming something out of Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’.  Hopefully our progeny will be imbued with enough of Lang’s hopeful epigram from his film:  “The mediator between the brain and the hands must be the heart!”