To put it simply, they don’t make them like they used to. I’m not talking about movies, household appliances, food, planes, trains or automobiles. They don’t teach work ethic like they used to. You can ask your grandparent or any older relative about what jobs they had when they were your age, and they would lecture you about their 72-hour unpaid shift at the coal mine. Nowadays you ask your friends if they have ever had an in-person interview for a job, and they would ask you what the word in-person means. 

That is the largest and constantly growing issue for society today, mostly thanks to technology. It separates people from each other and reality. Almost every kid would say that social media is helpful because they can talk and connect with their friends, but meeting new people and making connections is what this new generation of young adults aren’t going to know how to do. 

Let’s say someone does meet new people through social media and makes a virtual connection with someone. The social challenge and experience they are missing, though, is  learning how to act and treat people in real life, face-to-face. Students and even adults with office jobs who had to sit on Zoom calls for two years especially lack this ability. Half the time, these people didn’t even have their pants on when in class or at work, which wouldn’t go over well in a classroom or office space. 

Along with not knowing how to properly act in public, some people don’t even know what a real job is or looks like. A self proclaimed “social media influencer” may have some kind of job now, but it lacks staying power. People will upload one video with one million likes or views and think they are building a real career, but fame dies out quickly. Thousands of those views will be kids wanting to do exactly what these influencers are doing: not having to go into work a day in their life and not having a boss or a salary, instead relying on their 10-second clip to blow up. But that is no way to live and support a family, if that is what they desire to do. Most people become an influencer on accident.

Don’t get me wrong, not everyone gets where they are by accident. It’s mainly because they cheat their way to the top. If students didn’t have enough to stunt their growth already, cheating has become a bigger problem now than it ever was in the past. I’ve heard the joke that someone is going to become an “AI doctor ” or a “ChatGPT lawyer,” but those kinds of tools are actually how many students are getting themselves through school. They’re cheating. And cheating a lot. Cheating on everything. Whether it’s simply whispering to your friend during a test or generating an entire essay with AI, almost everyone has or will cheat in school (if they haven’t already.) But once they get out in the real world and face real world problems, artificial intelligence won’t always be there to help them. You can’t ask a computer how to prepare for an unexpected circumstance at work. It can’t make tough life decisions that happen in the moment, like how to say goodbye to a friend when they do you wrong or how to react in an emergency that comes out of nowhere. If, for example, a tornado is approaching your house and your first instinct is to ask ChatGPT what to do, something about our approach to learning and life in general has gone wrong. 

 There are reasons that older people think that our generation is softer, and a lot of the blame can be placed on our reliance on technology. Not everything was hand fed to our parents and grandparents like it is now. They didn’t have social-emotional learning lessons or mental health days. They weren’t allowed to leave school early or show up late because they were grabbing some Starbucks because they were having a bad day. They didn’t have participation trophies or learn that competitive games were played “just for fun.”  It was a different culture back then, one defined by its work ethic. But this doesn’t mean society is hopeless; we just need to get back to the times of hard manual labor and having conversations with each other instead of chat bots. Maybe then the young generation can learn what it really means to have some responsibility. Kids today can acknowledge that the tools at their disposal have obviously developed, but they can figure out ways to use them to assist rather than to cheat. Don’t prove the old heads right by living in your parents’ basement because you were too scared to meet an employer in person to get a job. Don’t settle for a situation that doesn’t make you happy because you’re scared and have never gone outside of your comfort zone. And definitely don’t spend a Saturday night chatting with an online robot when you could be meeting people you might grow to love.