The Tyranny of Cool

I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

Ask them about what's important to them and they'll counter your enthusiasm with a shrug and a mumbled, "I don't know." Somewhere between kid-dom and adolescence, your child stops asking sweek, inquisitive questions and starts acting like everything you care about and they used to care about is now completely useless.

I know, I'm dangerously close to sounding like every other person from the older generation here, lamenting the lost younger generation. But I'm going to go out on a limb and propose that really, today, something is different with our teenagers.

Maybe it's just a matter of degree ... I was pretty obsessed with being cool in my teenage years as well ... but we have to be open to the possibility that the decay we see in all areas of our planetary experience has spilled over into our young people.

And I don't mean just that difficult teenage time when rebeliousness seems a rite of passage. Of course, there are extraordinary and idealistic young people, dedicated and talented. But there's a lot of decadence, too. Let's try to understand it better today.

They Tyranny of Cool, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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