"College students today may be so busy worrying about themselves and their own issues that they don't have time to spend empathizing with others, or at least perceive such time to be limited," O'Brien said.
Give me some sunshine, give me some rain~ Give me another chance, I wanna grow up once again~A lot of parents don't have the financial means of helping their kids through college, something previous generations have been able to benefit from. We're more competitive out of necessity. We're competing against older people with more work experience for low level jobs that would have normally been available to us.
Only a donkey, well trained or not, goes with tedious jobs without thinking, too busy for anybody else, so long as he's being fed. A true genius muses under the shade of a tree, dreaming of ingenious things to do. So what does one choose to be: a brainless/unimaginative yet prosperous lap-dog, or a rascal who sought freedom and faced starvation and rain?
The source of lack of empathy all gets to one point: us. Each decision we choose will inevitably create some kind of cog to turn which will affect few others in the process, be it on the basis of regulations, inspiration or even competition. Personally, I loathe competition, which is basically the reason why I only enter some of them (reason being I love to show my art to people, not to win; but I also know there are those better than me and the thought of my art being ignored hits hard). My idea of human development is not by giving examples of successful people and surpass them. my idea of human development is the development based on various
multiple intelligence.
Competition itself has its own flaws,
especially how it was defined in the movie 3 Idiots. From what I gather, technology was actually meant to make people's lives easier, being an intellectual extension of a human body (creating a force which isn't equivalently powered by human efforts, in which case, "magic"). But in this regards economy also plays an evil game; economy's tendency is to create an amount of credit to help a person afford a number of necessities, but when the balance is shifted you actually have one person crawling in luxuries while the other starving to death, and all thanks to the genius of effortless money-making technology. This creates a role of competition amongst individuals who yearn to survive: again Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest.
Initially people's dependence on technology alone was limited, and the only way to survive was to congregate in groups, consider relations with other people (the more you're liked the more likely you'll survive; in fact, even today chicks/dudes watch out for social proof of the opposite gender). Today, money is actually a contract saying, "I don't care who you are and I don't care what emotional status you're in. You work for hours and you get paid. Deal?" So you see where the things are going.
This in turn breeds more crimes, especially when people get desperate they'd kill another for their own needs, especially when those people utilize people's "empathy" as their weakness. Consequences? People are told to be cautious, which leads to fear and thus people stop trusting strangers especially with their identity, and with no trust there can never be enough social connection or empathy. Terrorists attacking makes it even worse.
So basically each person has the right to worry about his future, but when that happens people would happily sacrifice others for their own ends if their lives seem to be at stake. But with this attitude we're not really any better than beasts.
So this is my Springtime of Youth resolution: Teach kids the importance of the human heart. If parents or teachers force you to be someone you aren't, FUCK it! Show your parents you're more than that! The world is your playground with lots of possibilities, and you can't be tied to one place eating peanuts. Go out there and eat a VARIETY of peanuts!! Find your path, or even BREAK a path if you want to, follow your heart and MAKE LOVE TO ART (the art of scientific invention is also art)! And also, LEARN because you want to or to use the knowledge to make a difference; DON'T learn just to get good grades. Any idiot can memorize a book and get 99% without knowing its significance. But we aren't all idiots, are we?
ANNNDDD find awesome ways to help the poor to get on their own feet and make their own destiny. Farming is better than charity.
SO WHO'S WITH ME?!