- As a child of the 90s I was raised on a steady diet of Disney movies and positive reinforcement. I grew up in a house where abundant praise was given for completion of the most mundane of tasks. Failures were justified and assigned an appropriate cause that absolved me of any wrongdoing. In school phrases like "a truly gifted writer" or "amazing insight" would be scribed upon my homework. I had my picture books "published" in the school library. Everyone told me I would be a best seller. Everyone said I would be loved by all.
Like so many others I feel like I was lied to. In the real world I am still a nobody. It is only in video games, the thing I was told most often to avoid growing up, that I feel like I have lived up to my destiny.
I have something to say: Shame and aggrandized humility are not the new "in" thing and freaking stop doing it. Only the kind of arrogant twiddle-whumpers who write blog posts about finding out they're not special to get 1,200 comments reinforcing how un-special everyone is (while making them feel special for being the one who said it) think it's special to announce you're not special. You aren't special. You're just human. Human beings have evolved over thousands of years to tend to hope for something greater when experiencing something less than satisfactory. The quest for enlightenment and the challenge of making do simply with the gift of being alive is probably older than our species. Neanderthals probably sat around the fire asking if they were really a great hunter, or if wife just told them so to make them get out of cave and hunt more. And goddamnit, if there was something wrong with the human tendency to substitute self-confidence for instant gratification and to believe in a better future, we wouldn't have evolved that way. (I know, I know, simplistic, but this is a quickie comment.) It's obviously adaptive in some way... and so is the later-in-life awakening and journey toward satisfaction with the middle ground. If people didn't self-validate and believe they were special when young, nobody would ever end up exceptional except by accident. Believing in specialness can drive people to work hard, or at least to survive poverty and other tragedies of young life. Likewise, if people didn't tend to have a rude awakening as they age and realign their goals with their abilities (should they NOT happen to become actually exceptional) we'd have a bunch of deluded middle-aged dads and moms walking around still convinced they have a bestseller in them and/or are a rock star in the making. OK, so a lot of older people DO still have those dreams, but that doesn't mean they don't realize deep down that what really makes them happy is all of their kids being safe, happy, and healthy, having a roof over their head, and being able to order a pizza now and then. This is the human condition. It is not the 90s. It is not Disney. It is being a conscious, thinking organism burdened with a congenitally inflicted desire to make sense of a world that is often brutal, always unfair, and yet filled with the mindboggling beauty and potential. If whales are sapient, they wonder if they're special, too. Likewise the nonhuman primates, likewise perhaps even rats. If we did not need the idea of "special" to grow through our metamorphosis from child to adult, we would not have religion, art, or music. If we did not universally believe in our ability to transcend our circumstances, people suffering extreme poverty and famine would lie down and die. Yes, you ARE special. You are special because of all the carbon atoms in the universe, the ones in your body clustered together and created consciousness, a being capable of self-analysis and questioning its specialness. Coming to the conclusion that perhaps that's more important than being "loved by all" is part of this conscious carbon cluster's journey.
Well said Saydrah. I enjoyed reading your response and tend to agree with most all you wrote. I have a really hard time tolerating self-pity of this sort.Human beings have evolved over thousands of years to tend to hope for something greater when experiencing something less than satisfactory. The quest for enlightenment and the challenge of making do simply with the gift of being alive is probably older than our species. Neanderthals probably sat around the fire asking if they were really a great hunter, or if wife just told them so to make them get out of cave and hunt more.
I should say that I don't really blame the blogger for being self-pitying. He's going through something that is also just part of being human, and if anyone is at fault for what a fool he looks like, it's Kotaku for publishing this twaddle. It's as if they're giving an audience to a child's complaints about puberty, except that it might actually be more interesting if a child of ten or eleven could write well enough and use an adult vocabulary to explain why they're upset about feeling hormonal and turning into a mini-man or mini-woman instead of a cute little boy or girl.
Something about this whole outlook really bothers me. The premise that he was lied to is irritating, his parents and teachers provided positive reinforcement to try and help him develop into a confident person. He wasnt 'lied' to, they didnt try to deceive him or trick him onto being something he wasnt, they wanted to help him become whatever he wanted. He was 'trained' from a young age to respond to trivial rewards (kind words, praise) which should have transitioned into a desire to earn non-trivial praise from others besides his immediate family. He failed. He chose instead the most trivial of all praise, game recognition. It was his decision to play games instead of becoming an adult. Many people choose this route as it fulfils an inner desire and its fun but it is the individuals fault, he chose to do this, when his grades were slipping in school etc. Claiming that people lied to him is a childish way to look at it, he has to accept he is the reason he didnt achieve his 'potential' whatever it might have been. There is no guarantee in life that you will be handed success just because you showed some initial potential. If you look at the people who succeed (not Bill Gates, just successful people) they normally made it by working their ass off or they got lucky. The Author didn't do either, instead he whines about his lack of success while doing nothing to achieve it. There are 7 billion people on the planet, most of them will live and die without acquiring the 'Success' the Author desires, the vast majority had much harsher childhoods without Disney movies. If you are reading this you are on the better side of the bell curve. Millions of people would trade places with him and be completely happy with their new life of comfort that he take for granted, maybe he should stop complaining and do something about it. Note: I'm hungover and crankier than normal.
> There is no guarantee in life that you will be handed success just because you showed some initial potential. That's what he wanted to be told hen he was young. Saying "Well done, you're very clever" is less helpful than saying "Well done, you worked hard for that. Keep working hard!" is better. When someone gets 85% but isn't working you can then say "Well done, but you can do better. You can work harder. You can be not just good, but great!".
Yes, as I've heard it stated before: there isn't enough emphasis being placed on the effort and the hard work that lead to success. There's plenty of praise being piled onto the child/person, and that's the problem. We say "Oh you're so smart because you got A's in your classes" instead of "Oh you worked so hard to get A's in your classes." One of those (the first) makes it sounds like your success is inevitable because you're smart, and smart people get things like A's in their classes. The other emphasizes a process of work, of gradual change through effort. Now, this isn't to say that no one should be told that they aren't smart. Many people are smart, and saying so should never be a bad thing. However, a more healthy mix of smart and hard work needs to be praised.
We do seem to be pushing childhood further and further into the future. And by that, I mean the way we institutionally coddle people. But that's just the deceit for attempting to build self-esteem; which isn't a horrible concept, even rooted in fraud. I think we are greatly underestimating the collective culture's ability to decipher the world. We have unbelievable technology, we are better at solving certain types of problems, but we are developing a culture of 'playing', whether it be school or work or relationships or empathy, that very much associates with gaming; a distancing from reality and the bullshit reinforcement of Darwinian outlooks; that winning is a real thing. The greatest lie that an older generation tells its young people is that those periods of human development and social change are related at all. Traditional appeals of any kind contain the lie that there is a universal sameness from generation to generation. My biggest fear (and this is born out of teaching in an undervalued section of the population) is the way we are increasingly unable to communicate despite all the wonderful mediums we have to do so. Twitter/Facebook, et al are predominantly about playing and winning. It fits perfectly with a culture increasingly uncritical; a culture of arbitrary value. We read and write in informational bursts. We react in nearly anonymous barf. We espouse opinions with the preface "tl;dr"; an inherent contradiction. It's a culture of subjectivity; opinions verified by valueless followers or grades. It's the nature of capitalism to require a massive advertising industry. How else would we polish all those turds? I've been a gamer my whole life. I love games. I loved competitive sports when I was younger as well. Those qualities are still deeply ingrained in my person. Even academic pursuits, which can be wrapped in a high-minded goodness, are tinged in a personal competition. But blaming entertainment for our social woes is silly. We create these systems. We create how to engage (or not) critically with our world. The "tl;dr" [insert opinion] isn't any different from it is what it is, or it was meant to be, or whatever fatalistic garbage comes from the new religion of laziness and disappointment. The major problem has never been being lied to, but the constant lying we do to ourselves.
"The major problem" is thinking there's a major problem. Do you think before Twitter every conversation was a philosophical milestone, or that Facebook was the start of vapid observations? Just because this person was suckered into gaming at the expense of his life, as many are, doesn't mean that our culture is weaker or that the constituents of the present are mindless husks compared to those of the past. We aren't increasingly unable to communicate. Or if we are, give me a reason to believe it that's not "look how dumb Tweets are!" Increasingly means you have evidence that we communicated better in the past. I can't find a compelling reason to believe that we used to.
Of course colloquial conversations weren't brilliant in another time. My point (from experiences in the educational world) is that our most pervasive methods of communicating (short form; uncritical; bolstered by valueless follower numbers, or degrees from paper mills) are reshaping the way we engage with thinking. How people communicated in the past is different; the medium isn't the value, but it shapes routines of expression. My fear is that we feel we are more informed, or are communicating better, because of our ability to aggregate content, but the quality of educational product (undergraduate work in research and writing; critical thinking and literacy) is abhorrent. I played school as an undergrad and I see a more intense version of playing school each year I'm engaged in higher ed. I think this is, in part, because of the way we communicate and what we believe (or value) in education; which seems to be yoking the world of work to the world of school; a connection which makes no sense. The proliferation of all sorts of 'degrees' points to the ridiculous nature of modern education. In essence, I think the ability of the masses to engage so widely, while beautifully open, has created a culture which I don't really think we have a grasp on. And to bring it back to game culture or the winners/losers paradigm, I wonder if our new forms of mass communication (online gaming, social media, 24/hr news, etc.) are obscuring reality and creating a pithier, morally-detached world.
What's with the massive increase in this idea (an actual meme?) that people in their twenties are the "deceived generation"? I'm willing to accept that since I'm in my twenties I just notice it more since it's my friends and acquaintances making these noises- older members, did you guys experience something similar? It really seems to be an underlying thread to a whole series complaints. In the UK and the US (the only two countries I know about) there's a litany of complaints about how a degree doesn't lead to a job anymore, how the rich[=old] have crafted a system where they profit massively, and now how being told "you're special" has led to people being shit.
I think what it comes down to is entitlement. Every generation seems to think that the next generation feels entitled. I'm guessing my grandfather thought that my father's generation had a problem with this, my father likely thinks that my generation does too. Most people when they are younger have large ambitions that can often stretch beyond the realm of possibilities. This is a good thing IMO as it can push us closer to the plausible. When we get older, we see the confines of possibility and work within that. I don't think it's a lie when people tell children that they are "special" or have potential. The lie is selling them the notion that they are guaranteed to stay that way.
I don't want this to be the story of my generation. I know so many people who are exactly like this, it terrifies me. Video games are a frighteningly-effective escape from reality. Incidentally, none of the comments already posted have anything to do with the part of the article that I found most fascinating. The special/not special, Western v. Tiger Mother stuff is trite and overdone -- the descent of childhood into destruction thanks to video games is fresh and scary ground.
You can't blame video games for being a scape from reality in many kids life. many people play video games and are not addicted. I think the real problem with most kinds playing video games,, is that is a easy way to keep kids calm or sited while parents can take a break without realizing that they can be doing a harm to their kids by not balancing their kids life, or simply leaving them do whatever they want. In some special case people have such I boring life, that they like living and alter reality in the video game world, I don't think that is bad, it would only be bad, if people star loosing their sense of reality and feel more alive on the virtual world than on real life.
life if not about being special, or making a change to the world, at the end is just about what makes you happy.
In a sense, you are very special. In many other senses, you are probably not. It's mostly about what you see as special. If you expect to be significant or world-changing, the odds are slim. It's kind of depressing in some ways, but it sure does take a lot of that pressure I had as a kid. (eg. if you don't do everything perfectly, you'll be a failure)
If you expect to be significant or world-changing, the odds are slim
I would disagree. The odds can be quite great that your life will be significant and even world changing to someone or even some people. What is unlikely is that you will be "famous". I fully expect that my life will be significant to some friends and family and certainly to my daughter. Hopefully, my life can have a positive impact on people beyond that sphere. But if I were to judge my worth based on "fame", chances are I'll be disappointed.
I have nothing to base what I'm about to say on... but it's my guess that if you were either: 1. highly influential (positively) on a small set of peoples lives that you interacted with intimately or were 2. highly influential in general but never intimately engaged with those you influenced you would be happier as the former.
In the comment below work says He chose instead the most trivial of all praise, game recognition.
Shares and likes are the second most trivial of all praise. For some people (remember Violentacrez), likes can be as addictive as game recognition. New question, potentially, for another thread, another day: How dependent are we on the feedback of others (even if the others are computer games) for our self-worth?