Raising The Last Generation

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche warned the world about the emergence of a proverbial Last Man. The last man for Nietzsche was the embodiment of many negative qualities, he never lived for a purpose, he never followed his dreams or took any risks. His life was based in eating, staying warm, and well fed; a dry meaninglessness that Nietzsche found revolting. What particularly marked the Last Man, according to a Nietzsche, was his disdain for history, or anything that came before him. The dangers of the last man come home to me when I hear a lot of modern ideas of adolescents.

A friend told me a story recently of a children’s ‘expert’ he heard speaking at his Church. This ‘expert’ said that ‘even people in their thirties today cannot understand what it means to be a teenager today’. He backed this up with antidotes and it left many people in the congregation deeply concerned about the problems faced by today’s young people, and there relative uselessness in the face of this growing pandemic of youth violence and sexual expression.  Yet any quantitative research from any respected sociologist or psychologist would refute this claim entirely, even Christian sociologists like Bradley Wright warn about people warning us about the dangers faced by the youth today, they are usually marketing a seminar or raising money.

I don’t think these people ill natured or directed by greed. I think them well meaning professionals who are legitimately concerned about the practices that they see young people they care about engaging in. Maybe they didn’t do them when they were young, but I can assure you they were being done. Though they the internet opens doors that have been long closed, and reveals things not available to us only 10-25 years ago, that would only be a huge danger if any of it was true.  

A story I read recently tells the tale of a women raising her son to have her values. The mother and father where impressed by their young son’s intellectual prowess and where excited to send him to the best school in philosophy and the like for many year. The boy walked away from his parents beliefs, slept around, engaged in all sorts of dangerous and risky behavior, culminating in moving in with a women and getting her pregnant out of wed lock. This man was St. Augustine, and his story was from 389-400 A.D.

It is true that you will never understand what its like to be a teenager, or a young person. When we look back on our memories of our youth we look back through the lens of adulthood and it is a rare person who can see the absurdities of our thought process. But the lens of adulthood adds to your ability to appreciate the dangers kids face all the more. There are new ones, to be certain, but are they any worse than when in ancient Rome young boys went through a period of being sexual concubines to adult males? Kids can’t understand the dangers because they have not got the experience. Yet Dr. Alan E. Kazdin the John M. Musser Professor of Psychology at Yale University and Director of Yale's Parenting Center, who has over thirty years of experience working directly with adolescences, insists that most kid navigate adolescence just fine, and this generation is no different.

What we tell parents and kids, when we tell them that they can’t understand each other, is that there is no hope, and nothing to learn from each other. I remember in my own past well meaning adults who insisted that things were much tougher today (1995). Bradley Write identified Babylonian Tablets that have similar warnings about the future generation. Yet the facts say that kids would rather, when asked in confidence, talk to their parents about things like sex and peer pressure. Many adults lament that they did not have in depth discussions with their parents about these subjects.  

What we do when we fill people’s heads with nonsense about how hard it is to be a kid these days is not only tell them the past has no relevance, but we tell parents they have nothing to offer their children. This takes the onus off of us to talk about the admittedly difficult topics that come up in every adolescence sense the beginning of man. We run a serious risk of breeding a generation of Last Men every time we take in ideas about youth uncritically. Especially ideas as sweeping as “Parent just don’ understand” DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince (1988)

Parents do understand, parents can understand. If you’re an adult your experience has something of value to offer a young person. And if you don’t do the work to build those connections with the young people you care about pimps, drug dealers and all around perverts are all waiting in the wing to fill the need in young people to reach out and learn from adults. Yes it is not easy, and kids may say they hate it, but your time and investment in your kids, or a young person, is of great value, even if they don’t appear to appreciate it at the time.

And if you do need help with any of the issues that come up during parenting get in touch with at www.lifetoolsonline.com. Or follow us on twitter http://twitter.com/LifeToolsOnline for daily updates.

Also consider contacting your local chapter of big brothers or big sisters. Chances are there is a young person out there that will benefit from your time and your experience.

Recommended Reading:       

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

By: Friedrich Nietzsche

The confessions

By: Saint Augustine

Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites...and Other Lies You've Been Told:

By: Bradley Wright

The Kazdin Method

By: Alan Kazdin

Getting what you want from relationships.

               In the early 2000’s a Carlsberg beer commercial started off with the image of a man and a women in a passionate embrace.  The voice over starts off with “Who would have thought the best sex I ever had”. This was followed by a pause for dramatic effect, and some clothing being discarded, then the commercial ends with “would be with your wife.” Before it fades to black the now scantily clad couples hands are shown interlocked, wedding rings apparent. It ends with “Welcome to your Carlsberg years”.

                The commercial has stuck with me for many years not because of couple; they were the typical people one would find in a beer commercial. It stood out because it was so preposterous to me at that the best sex I would ever have would be with my wife?  Like most young men I looked at marriage as antiquated and something older people did. At beast an evolutionary mechanism designed for the raising and protection of children; or a cruel joke on the part of God.

                I recently read a book called ‘Empire of Illusion’ by Chris Hedges. In the chapter entitled ‘The Illusion of Love’ he gives a clear picture into the pornographic world.  He tell tales of women being treated in terrible ways, though none by force apparently. His conclusion was simple, the opposite sex  is to used for sex. Sex in itself is the height of intimacy in the modern world. A height many people try to climb.

                For many men it starts with porn. Porn feed the desire for sex like cola feed thirst. It starts off feeling like it’s feeding the thirst, when in actual fact it is not what your body needs, and once you body realizes this the thirst comes back all the more viciously. People who become addicted to this medium describe  themselves as climbing a ladder of sexual perversity. Initially innocent sexual images become increasingly perverse.

                Women struggle less often with porn but another medium can often confuse and mislead them just as much, and in the end be just as harmful, that medium being Hollywood.  Big movies paint a picture of romantic love that is very rarely anything akin to what love is or should be. Relationships rarely take the form of easy meetings and happy endings.  Intimacy that is not built over time is little more than thinly veiled lust, it has its place, but it wears off.

                I wish I could say I did struggle with porn. I took a different tract. I read books by men involved in the pickup artists lifestyle. In their pages I found tips and tricks to get a woman into bed. Like many I mistook the pleasure of sex for fulfillment. But like porn, or Hollywood, I was left wanting. The old adage “be careful what you wish for” became all too real for me.  It was after reading ‘The Game’ by Neil Strauss that I understood how far I had fallen.

                ‘The Game’ is often criticized for its role in the further objectifying women. I didn’t get that from the book. Instead I read the stories of men who managed to get into bed with a lot of young attractive women, but the cost was that was alcoholism, suicide attempts, and various other forms of destructive behavior as these men continued to seek sex at the cost of intimacy.

                Women are no less deluded, though their delusions take them down different roads. Paris Hilton once said that “Every woman should have four pets in her life. A mink in her closet, a jaguar in her garage, a tiger in her bed, and a jackass who pays for everything.” It’s a cute saying. The truth is though that when we build unrealistic expectations on our mate to be anything else but a partner in all of lifes adversity we rob ourselves.

                Most relationship advise is a grandiose adventure in missing the point. Men don’t want sex anymore then women want money. Yes we all want financial security, we all want a healthy sex life. But the road to getting those things is nothing to do with getting laid or living off a “jackass”. What we all want in our hearts is to find someone who can really know us, and in spite of our faults love us. It is our hearts cry for the security that comes from being deeply and truly loved. This kind of love is born of intimacy, and intimacy is born of mutual work and sacrifice together on the road of life.

                Intimacy is not like passion that one feels when they meet someone they immediately click with. Clicking is excellent but it is inherently temporary. Passion is a fire, but it’s a balm fire, not and an enduring flame. It go’s out fast, and unless you have used that time of passion to build real foundations it won’t be long before you wake up realizing you don’t love the person you are with. I would argue that you probable never loved them to begin with. Passion can be a great tool for building intimacy; it can also work feverishly against it. Much depends on the actions of the couples in its thrall. A person cannot feel passion all the time, intense emotional states dye out because our minds are not set up with the ability to maintain them. For good reason, in the throws of intense emotion our ability to perceive the world is blurred at best, blinded at worst.

                Intimacy is forged by building a life with someone. By being honest and taking risks. By suffering together, working together, struggling on goals as a couple. Be it buying that first house, to raising children, intimacy is born of long term commitment. Someone who’s love for us is based in who we are, not how we look or what we drive.  And intimacy is what we really want when we take the courage to be intimate with ourselves and look honestly at what is going on beneath the surface of our drives for sex or financial security. The greatest love stories are not told in minutes, they are told in years. But they take the courage, vulnerability, wisdom and patience.

                In the book ‘The Murder Room’ we see the danger of trying to find our way to intimacy through alternative means. The book about the real life crime solving Vidocq society tells about the stages a person goes through on the road to becoming a serial killer. For serial killers, according to the murder room, life is about getting intimacy without having to be vulnerable, which is impossible. For serial killers it often starts with porn, but it always ends in ever evolving grotesque acts of violence and murder as they seek to get the feeling of intimacy without the necessary components of time, courage, and vulnerability.

          If you’re having trouble on the road to intimacy we can help you. From tips to finding that perfect someone to repairing relationships that have gone astray. Come and see us at www.lifetoolsonline.com. And you can follow us on Twitter for daily incites and suggestions http://twitter.com/LifeToolsOnline .

Reccommended Reading:

Empire of Illusion

By: Chris Hefges

The Game

By: Neil Strauss

A word of caution:

If you're going to read this book, then read it all. It does tell the whole story of this lifestyle honestly and will introduce you to the dangerous and afective tools of this lifestlye. I do not reccomend dishonesty at anypoint in dating.

The Murder Room

By: Michael Capuzzo

Bad Emotions vs. Evil Emotions

Noted psychologist and author M. Scott Peck once asked his son to define evil. The little boys response was ‘live spelt backward’. Dr Peck used his sons point to define evil in his book ‘People of The Lie: South of McCowan Rd RT on Ellesmere  a Psychology of Evil’. Evil people, and evil in general, in Pecks perspective, were those things that took the quality from life, the joy, the good, and eventually life itself.

 

Evil is a topic we don’t like much in our society. For good reason. For centauries people have misused it to class entire groups of people as creatures of darkness in some way. From witch hunts to racism evil has been a label under which much evil has been done. And I would agree that much human evil is really shades of gray, and the label itself invites trouble.  The problem is that there is still evil, in that there are still things that destroy life; and emotions can be evil.

A few weeks ago I was listening to a seminars on mental health by a professional in the field. During the series this professional presented, anger, anxiety, and sadness as emotions we were supposed to move away from, and into joy, and various other words for happy. It all sounded very nice, sadly it was not true. All emotion has the potential for good, and the potential for evil. In that when understood properly they can add to your life. When they are left unchecked they can destroy your life.

It is a common mistake to think of bad feeling as evil. In that we equate them to things that are dangerous or destructive and to be avoided.  The problem with that is that feeling bad is often good. When we make mistakes we feel shame, it helps us not to make them again. When we lose a loved one we get sad, as we should, the mourning process helps us to honor the life that was lost. Even Anger has it place, in that it can sharpen our wits, and helps us protect ourselves in dangerous situations. Though I would characterize good ager as passion, and assertiviness, it is still Anger.  Anxiety is often our first warning coming into a dangerous situation.  One of the best books every written for teaching people how to handle themselves around dangerous people is called the “Gift of Fear” by Gavin De Becker; described by Opera as a “Book every woman should read”.

Bad feelings may make us feel uncomfortable, but they are not evil. They don’t destroy life, unless they become your life. Momentary Anxiety is wise and good, constant anxiety is a sign that something is wrong. Weather you believe life evolved, or was created, emotions did not end up in you by chance. They serve a purpose in life. Joy and love are certainly good as lifestyles, bad feelings are better as an alarm system, but a life devoid of either is no kind of life.

Love is a good emotion, and our lives are better the more thay are characterized by love. But love can blind us to the faults in our beloved. Women and men in abusive relationships of all kinds can attest to this. Love of Country gone awry has been the cause of countless wars and suffering. Joy is good, but joy can blind us to dangers. Like the euphoria a good sales person can muster in us before we are sold something we really don’t need.   All feelings, properly expressed, add to the quality of our life, but any of them out of balance can destroy our lives.

Aristotle said “Anyone can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person at the right time, and for the right purpose and in the right way - that is not within everyone's power and that is not easy” One could apply this quote to any emotion.

Remember bad feelings aren’t evil. Feelings are powerful tools. If understood properly they add to your life regardless of how they make you feel. It’s when they fall out of balance that that we have to be concerned about them. If you’re concerned about your feelings, let us help you.  Come and see us at www.lifetoolsonline.com. And follow us on twitter www.twitter.com/lifetoolsonline
Recommended reading:

People of the Lie
By M. Scott Peck Book Review

The Gift of Fear
By Gavin De Becker

-Charles Gordon