"We live in an amazing, amazing world, and it's wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots." Yeah! The current impatient generation, damn kids and their internet and their MTV and their iPods. Come on. Basic human nature is unchanging. There's going to be spoiled idiots in every generation, regardless of the technology that's around. The father of the Wright brothers is attributed with saying, "If man were meant to fly, God would have given him wings." Damn kids and their aero planes! That guy makes good and funny points, but the thought that this generation is somehow more spoiled than past generations is irritating to me. I also feel obligated to say, I'm 23 and am therefore a product of This Spoiled Generation.
oh my. The Berry... that place used to dive me nuts when we would leave ESA and go to lunch in the Berry. fricking lights on the side of the road.
My kids work hard at school and get lots of things. They have a good work ethic, but they have never suffered great loss or know what it feels what it is like to not get what you need, let alone what you want. Until you know that life still has promise when you have nothing I don't think you can ever appreciate the blessings that come your way.
True enough. The last generation to appreciate this were the ones who lived through WW2. Few people in successive generations understand true hardship or privation.
I will admit that for the last decade or so I have lived a very comfortable life thanks to my parents- and that I was not grateful in the slightest for this up until the last two years or so. The first decade of my life was rather challenging when it came to finances and material things, but since then we have been very blessed. I woke up one day and I realized that I was living a life that had no real purpose- just to play the next thing, buy this, get that. It really was a soulless experience. I have learned and am learning the virtues of the sweat of my own brow, and just how awesome it feels to have responsibility in life. It is taking time, but I am very excited to see that I have changed. Hopefully one day the rest of my generation will wake up and realize the same.
If people say the current generation is spoiled, I can't necessarily disagree with that. But go beyond that, is a 10 year old kid supposed to not want the things that he wants? It's up to the parents to instill hard work and good ethics in them. So yeah, the current generation is spoiled but only because parents are the ones spoiling them. It's a bad thing and probably will get worse is th sad thing.
fried, i have no doubt that because this lesson is exciting to you, it is something you will pass on to your own children some day, should you have any. i was very lucky that way. my parents taught me very early on that if i wanted nice things, i had to work my butt off for them. was i spoiled? probably a little bit. my parents indulged me here and there. but they also taught me that life wasnt a free pass and i had to work hard to even think of asking for anything. i too was blessed with parents who had the ability to provide for me and make life comfortable. and i was also blessed that they taught me that comfort came from hard work.
It is the parents' faults that children are spoiled, but it's human nature to gather more and more stuff. I try very hard not to over-spoil my daughters, and my seven-year-old is increasingly coming home from friends' houses, telling me what all of them have. I just tell her, "That's nice," and go on with our conversation. That's not saying that my two kids don't have tons of stuff (they do), but I am trying, very hard, to instill that we don't just get everything we want, and they are both learning that they have to pay for extra items they might want (magazines, play cell phones, iTunes songs, etc.) out of money they get for their birthdays, etc. The question is: Will that be enough for them not to be, ultimately, spoiled?
If they are exposed to children who truly do not have "things", I think they would have a greater appreciation of how fortunate they are.
