"YOUR GENERATION IS DOOMED"
“Your Generation is Doomed”
This morning, I awoke reflecting on the conversation with my students from Thursday’s class. A student wanted to know my opinion about what an adult had told a group of young people. The speaker said that this generation of young people is doomed. She was saying that their doom was a result of what they are eating, the current political climate in which we live, the economy, etc.. The student said that she thought that the speaker was right.
I worked very hard to pull the students back from the abyss of these words and back into the context of the class. Everything that I am teaching invites them to change their minds about accepting this script. I recently wrote a book about how we spoke to young people about Covid and I argue that there is commonality between the words of then and now.1 The lingering question this morning is: what are we doing to our young people and does the older generation owe them better than this?
The content from the course helped me to address the opportunities present so the students can start to see some options:
Language is a frame and not reality. A choice of words is a choice of worlds. What kind of world is created by this person’s words?
Just because someone frames a situation a certain way, does not mean that the listener needs to accept it. What are the alternative ways of seeing? What is the price paid for acceptance?
When we speak, we speak into a field of consequence. What are the consequences of these words?
These words are constructed around the future world that the speaker envisions. Does the speaker have a crystal ball? Does the speaker know the future?
If we look at the past, how do we imagine things looked to young people? I spoke about my mother’s generation (their grandparents or great grandparents) and asked them to imagine how things may have looked for them.
I relied on the theory (from the Greek meaning to see) of the course to offer a different way of seeing. First, the discipline of Rhetoric offers the understanding that words are powerful, create a reality, and are persuasive. I invite my students to try to develop an objectivity when they listen to others. I want them to be reminded that they have a choice as to whether or not they accept another’s words and just telling them that they have a choice, reminds them that they are free. Second, I have just begun to introduce the philosophy of Stoicism that provides the students with a more productive way of seeing the world rather than this gloomy way of seeing their impending fate. At the core of Stoicism, is the belief that we have the opportunity to choose the most optimistic way of seeing our lives because anything less than being optimistic is not life-affirming. In other words, everything is over if they accept that their future is doomed. I am starting to introduce the students to the most well-known historical Stoic figures who were fully acquainted with suffering. None of the Stoics led pleasant lives. They produced greatness anyway. Third, I am trying to weave these threads of Stoic philosophy into the book they are reading by Viktor E. Frankl. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is a practical application of Stoic philosophy although he never uses the word Stoic within the text.2 I want my students to understand that Frankl was able to think his way through the concentration camps, create his own theory, and survive the camps because he had received an education in philosophy. Frankl inspires my students to find a way regardless of circumstances. I hope that school inspires my students to study and receive an education that helps them navigate through their lives. Because Frankl was a Stoic, he saw that suffering was a part of life. Moreover, he states that those who gave up while in the camps were potentially doomed not because they were in a concentration camp but because they gave up. Of this group of prisoners, he states: “Such people forget that often it is such an exceptionally difficult situation which gives man the opportunity to grow beyond himself.”3 Spoken like a true Stoic.
The student asked me in class what my opinion was regarding this person’s words because she did not know exactly what to do with them. I think that she was asking for an alternative to the pessimism, nihilism, apathy, negativity, and hopelessness constructed. I hope that she and the other students walked away with a feeling of agency in their own lives. I cannot tell them, with certainty, that everything will be alright but I can tell them that if they adopt this fatalistically destructive view of their future, it will not end well. I hope that they walked away with both a sense of agency and urgency to make themselves and the world a little better. The purpose of the difficulties of their lives is not to destroy them but instead, to make them stronger, more resilient, better able to live up to their potential and better able to help others.
Honestly, I cannot wait to get back to class and continue the conversation.
Janet Farrell Leontiou, Words Have Consequences, due out next year from Peter Lang.
Janet Farrell Leontiou, Viktor E. Frankl Goes to Community College: How Creating Meaning May Save Your Life (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2022).
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006): 72.