Youth Blindness
Thursday, February 18th, 2010When I was young enough to be young and old enough to be aware of the conversation people who weren’t young enough to be young were having about my age group, I was constantly bewildered. Why did they get it so wrong? Why were they talking so assuredly about what we were like while being so inaccurate? Why were they piecing together a few trends to make blanket statements about what “kids today” were like? Whatever they were talking about, it didn’t have any resonance to the way I saw the world of my friends and me.
That sense of puzzlement will be important for me to remember for the next 20 years or so. Mind Hacks helps by seemingly interpreting the main message of The Breakfast Club directly into parent-speak.
The monologue that bookmarks The Breakfast Club, with the line “You see us as you want to see us - in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions”, succinctly captures how society’s view of youth changes and yet always stays the same.
For the current younger generation, the simplest terms are mostly taken from psychiatry. This will eventually change and our recurrent anxieties about the young will largely be expressed in the next most convenient definition.
As a society, we are strangely blind to the complexities of youth.
As much as I like that last line, I do have to quibble with it. Do we need to call youth complex? I’m not saying it isn’t, but what gives those old people the wisdom to call it so? Again, when I was young, I remember being completely confused hearing adults talk about how hard it was to be a teenager. Sure, I had problems, but I didn’t see my awkwardness as such nor did I attribute any of my problems to being young…it was all I knew up to that point in my life. I think a better closing line would have been to say we are blind to the properties, or experience, of youth.