I don’t know why this is so silly but maybe it’s because I was a thoughtless college yute in the 1980s:
Today’s college students are 40-per-cent less empathetic than those of the 1980s and 1990s, says a University of Michigan study that analyzed the personality tests of 13,737 students over 30 years. The influx of callous reality TV shows and the astronomical growth of social networking and texting – technologies that allow people to tune others out when they don’t feel like engaging – may be to blame, the authors hypothesize…The researchers found a 48-per-cent decrease in empathic concern and a 34-per-cent decrease in perspective-taking between 1979 and 2009. In particular, post-millennial students were far less likely to agree with statements such as, “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.”
Forty-eight percent! Who knew? Weren’t we the “me generation” or is every group at that age lumbered with that label? I recall college years being based upon the need to get beer, find money to get beer and to consume that beer. I can think of one or two guys who were involved with ding something good for others and the hundreds of others I met were just getting by and/or getting it on one way or another. Tender concerned feelings were demonstrated by that guy who kept the collection of empty rye whisky bottles in his dorm room. Now, to be fair, there were more dudley do right Earth Day organizing sorts after my degrees were obtained by 1991 but even that would not qualify so much as perspective as a amateur junior lobbyism practice. Then was the time of the rise of the “anti-s” and should nots.
What is being such rose coloured revisionism? Must be today’s parents. Trained as they were in a pool of ale and shooters, I feel for them.