The brevity of awareness, fear of enlightenment, and certainty that a kind of contagion will result from knowledge are all maladies plaguing modernity. We drag fear of the unknown from out of our distant past where the dark forest-harbored monsters bent on devouring our souls. Those things unseen and unexperienced would offend our sensibilities and bring disappointment, should we waste our time and money on that which we are certain we wouldn’t enjoy anyway. This is what living in history burdens us with – combined with a short lifespan that may not wake us to the lies.
A generation born of living in the moment and experiencing immediacy has been sheltered from the outside world by parents who wanted to shield them from that which they themselves feared more than living. Then, when their offspring, unaccustomed to face-to-face interactions, adapted to their sequestered existence, parents complained that their children didn’t have the social skills they deemed appropriate. In isolating their children, they cast the mold while the negative patterns were being reinforced by their own preoccupation and titillation delivered by the anxiety engine of television and the numbing of intimacy due to online porn.
Parents gleefully supplied the multitude of screens and connectivity to their children who assimilated the worse qualities of a society enchanted by the narrowing of their focus. Then, these very same parents dared have the audacity to question what happened to a generation as though they were fully unaware of their own selfish actions having an influence on their children. We look to tradition and nostalgia with the warmth that is now unjustified in light of the circumstances of being forced into an evolutionary catapult called technology.
With this type of conditioning, we should expect a deterministic behavior where the comfort of routine is returned again and again. To expect someone to wake from this state is magic thinking at best, but this is what the Boomers and Generation X expect of the Millennials, and Gen Z. We have created computer programs based on old paradigms that require the exact same results of the software to function like clockwork.
Nondeterminism is defined as a program that can exhibit different behaviors on different runs. I’m hijacking the term here and defining Neo-nondeterminism as an idea that people need to explore the intentionality of not doing things the same way over and over. They must get off their self-reinforcing hamster wheel of routine and change the pattern. From home to work, back home, cook, clean, sleep, back to work, and back home should not be fully normalized. Throw a monkey wrench into that routine.
Start some tutorials about a subject you would like to know more about or that you never considered learning. Pick a country on the globe, find a recipe from that country, and make a new dish for dinner. You might want to search YouTube for a list of songs from the same place to listen to while you cook and try these new flavors. Go bowling in drag just because, or start a band even if you don’t play an instrument. You have but this one life to try those things that are not reinforcing the boring potential we all call routine. Stop being so rigid in the outcomes you are accepting as what’s comfortable to you. You learned to poop outside the diaper into a toilet; you can learn to stop pooping on your opportunity for new experiences.