Took an ultra-smart, beyond-enterprising twenty-something to lunch last week and received some eye-opening intel on the people who would be coming for our jobs (thank God), in the unlikely event that those jobs are still there to be had (pray God).
Learned at least two things during this lunch:
• It is apparently now ridiculous to bring paper and pen to a lunch meeting. “Woah, paper! And you got your pen there!” my man said to me with a chuckle as he fended off emails coming in on his phone. (No emails were coming in on my paper.)
• People in their mid-late twenties regard younger members of their own generation the way the WWII generation regarded … the Gen-Xers, maybe? Though these people are separated only by a few years, those years include COVID school shut-downs, the advent of ChatGPT and adjudication-through-TikTok of cataclysmic and complex world events like October 7.
“Illiterate” is the term this young man matter-of-factly used to describe people only a half-dozen years younger than him. (I know, because I wrote it down in pen, on my piece of paper.)
“Illiterate?” I said.
“They can’t read!” he said.
He meant it more constructively than judgmentally—the way the Boomers, when I was coming up, complained that “nobody can write anymore! (so how am I going to find cheap young writers?).”
Only now, nobody can read! My lunch companion suggested that at the next big speechwriters conference we have a session on “storytelling [for] illiterate folks.”
Far out, man: At a conference of the speechwriters to the leaders of the free world, we should do a session on storytelling for illiterate folks.
Life comes at you fast (as we used to say back in the day.)
This reminds me of something that happened to me a few months ago. I was working on something in coffee shop, writing with… wait for it.. a FOUNTAIN pen. A Gen-Zer actually came up to me with an astonished look asked me me what I was using, like it was a light-saber or something. I was flabbergasted. At least I chose the polite explanatory response, vs the impolite ‘stab in the neck’ response.
I’ve been reading comments from college instructors who are confirming that, literally, many students cannot read a book. The very thought of reading something containing so many words and requiring hours of time paralyzes them.
I know I’m an old Boomer tsk-tsking at yournger folks the way previous generations have done but in conversations I have with some younger people in their 20’s and early 30’s, it seems to me that there are layers of thinking notably absent in them, at least as expressed on conversation.
I think perhaps my proudest achievement as a parent is that my children are intellectually curious readers. I don’t know how much good this will do them in such an irrational world, but at least they are comfortable being alone (with a book) which means they are largely immune to herd thinking, which is usually set at the lowest common denominator.