Your problems are lame and pathetic, By Mark Morford

[madokie]

Your problems are lame and pathetic
By Mark Morford

Fact: Young people of binge-drinking college age are completely self-centered, insufferable dorkmonkeys with the souls of immature doorknobs, and they have entirely vacuous Facebook pages to match. There, I said it.

No wait: Actually, science said it, more or less, via a strange and rather impossible new study, informing anyone who might care to listen that young people, well, they just don't really give a damn about you, the world or its pathetic little problems -- at least, not as much as they used to. Hey, it's a study. So you know it must be true.

Behold, one my favorite cultural gyrations. I simply love it when staid science furrows its brow, digs deep into the shallow gene pool that is the young, massively entitled, hormonally engorged, eternally baffled college-aged American animal, and attempts to examine his meager brain, draw out something resembling actual substance, evaluate it, quantify it, and then claim it as some sort of valuable truism.

So it is we learn that young people today, particularly this sample of 14,000 college kids, admit to having roughly 40 percent less empathy than their peers of just 20 or 30 years ago -- i.e. youth of the late '70s and '80s, a gaggle of humans not exactly famous for their intelligence, substance and depth. But never mind that now. ...

(Full URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/06/02/notes060210.DTL&nl=fix)

[Turbineguy]

1. Sounds like a

republican future.

For a while anyway. Until the Visigoths show up.

[SemiCharmedQuark]

5. Yeah, that's why young people voted overwhelmingly for Dems.

:eyes:

That "more empathetic" group gave us Reagan.

[Odin2005]

8. Yep. this is typical "kids these days" hysteria.

We don't identify with the paternalistic pseudo-empathy cultivated by midlife "Grease" Generation folks in the 60s and 70s. We care more about DOING things for others rather then just pitying them.

[madokie]

2. Kick one time

[mdmc]

3. I saw a thread jocking the empathy study yesterday

but in there defense, who has time to care for others these days?

[Odin2005]

4. Like I said elsewhere, the study is BS junk science.

Seriously, the way those questions are worded, based on the ones given in the article, would not be given a positive answer from most Millennials no matter how empathetic they are. No Millennial guy would admit to having "gentile and tender feelings". And the questions themselves have an air of paternalistic pity more than true empathy, typical of the generation of the folks that would have originally wrote the questions 40 years ago ("Oh, those poor brown people, they need our help!!!").

A question about empathy that would be understood better by Millennials would be something like "I can understand why someone holds a certain opinion, even if I disagree with it".

[Taitertots]

6. Of course we are not empathetic

Look at the world we inherited from you.

[lunatica]

7. I haven't seen that in my job

I work in administration in UC Berkeley. What I'm seeing now is more stress in the students. They're forced to make choices between careers that guarantee them an income as opposed to careers in the field they love. Their future looks bleak and they know it.

[Orsino]

9. The conservative triumph.

It didn't happen because corporate-conservative policy actually improves lives. It happened because the TV says it improves lives.

[malaise]

10. Very nice

Thanks madokie :hi:

[Omar4Dems]

11. He misses the point...

He goes off on a tangent about sex toys and iPhones, which has nothing to do with the study. The facts of the study don't change: that the respondents said they don't care about their fellow human beings very much. It doesn't matter whether sex toys or iPhones caused it, widespread apathy exists all the same.

[treestar]

12. This is always true of the young

Every older generation thinks its young people are something new and scary!