The Young to the Young

One of the pleasant surprises I have got from joining our specific club is that I am now genuinely learning from millennials who are not trying to be millennials.  I simply come from a generation that seems to love having labels for things and right now, the young people in the club I am a fellow member are not trying to be a label, they are simply trying to find their way in life and through education they hope to proceed down a known pathway.

While college is the known pathway, the digital landscape is the unknown pathway and it is being invented as we speak.  In the digital space, the online properties that are most successful are the one's that are creating the known pathways - but before they created them, there was no right or wrong answer - the way the digital path has been woven assumes that we are placing our trust in the most successful new pathways.

In our group the most surprising revelation I have found is that there are issues happening within the students lives that do not appear on the online radar, and this idea that young people map everything online is simply a generalized assumption.  As I see how the young are to the young, without my oldie mind interfering or interpreting what it is I see, the net wisdom is seeing how the young are with the young. 

This interpersonal mind is a different reality to the one I experienced during my youth and it is a more immediate on a one-to-one basis that has been enabled by alwayson technologies.  Oldies spend way too much time exploring social pathology, that the only way we really get to experience the social health of young people is spend time with them as equals and not as their seniors.  This interpersonal mind does have a digital equivalent which demonstrates another way young people are with young people. 

A great example is The Unplugged Project.  While the discernment I observe at the club level between students is highly nuanced, there are other young people who offering creative cameo's to their fellow youth that are meant for thoughtful people.  The kind of club that I am member is naturally a great meeting point for above average thoughtfulness.  For now I will share the four video's of from a collaboration between The Ming Thing and Digi :

"Relationship Status"

    "iMagination"

"#nofilter"

"Moments"

When I hear all the talk about all the problems with digital existence it is often a lecture or an opinion or talking head - but it is not necessarily an exercise in thoughtfulness or the opportunity for young people of today to address things to young people of today.  When I am privy to this and I am, I write this just as much to reinforce how precious this trust is and how best I should honour it, which is to note that it does exist but it is not a story to tell or a caricature to have long debates - these are things that best simmer in our own minds, without us trying to own this or create social drama from it or even have an opinion about it.

The things I observe that have no social label to them are few and far between and what I am discovering within my club is only discovered in the moment, for people who are willing to observe but put their own fingerprints on what they are observing.  This then becomes a privilege to simply be able to observe how the young are to the young - when this observation is observing thoughtfulness and the purity of relationships that are unadulterated by the adult.

What the digital landscape has provided is a much more exposed landscape but that does not mean that young people have a desire to share everything and the assumption that they are sharing everything is simply us oldies treating them as if they were us.  They are us when we were their age, but there is an interesting aspect about an oldie's brain - we tend to spin new meanings to the memories of our own youth,  until they are not an actual representation of when we were young, but now a representation of our own maturity assessing that memory.

One day these young people will become who we are as oldies and that means two things, one they had the blessing to live a long life and they have even greater experience to know when to be hands off allowing the young to be with the young.

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