Like I am at a point at the end of my career where I should be seeking apprentices, I should be training apprentices right now, that is what people in my industry do.
That is the natural progression. You work, you learn, you build skill, and then you pass it on. That is how the whole system is supposed to sustain itself.
But I cannot fucking do so because kids and young adults now can't do it, they won't learn, they refuse to learn, they won't answer questions, the moment anything gets even a modicum difficult they give up, they won't read instructions, I have heard them outright ask 'what do you want me to answer' to open ended not a single correct answer questions, I've heard people 17+ with no neurodivergences go 'This is too hard' when asked to read a single page of already oversimplified information, and in my industry that isn't acceptable
and by the kids' OWN WORDS, not even me making assumptions, EVERY TIME professionals go 'hey kiddos what's up?' they go 'social media' like what am I supposed to say other than 'well we gotta do something about the social media then, and if the answer isn't barring them from it then we at least need to insert stricter guard rails for them'
And what makes it harder is that none of this is coming from nowhere or out of nowhere frustration. This is coming from direct, repeated experience in environments where learning is supposed to happen through guided practice. Where the entire point is that people do not know yet, and are meant to build confidence by being allowed to struggle through unfamiliar tasks.
But what I am seeing instead is a level of learned helplessness that kicks in almost immediately the moment something is not instantly obvious.
Not “I need clarification,” not “can you break that down,” but outright disengagement. Shutdown. Refusal to engage further. I've watched whole adults throw actual TANTRUMS over being expected to intake BASIC information. Not because the task is actually impossible, or even difficult, but because the expectation of effort itself seems to have become absolutely unbearable.
And that is not something you can train around in a professional setting that requires safety, precision, or independent thinking.
Because apprenticeships are not passive learning environments. They are not content consumption. They require asking questions, making mistakes, trying again, paying attention to feedback, and actually sitting with the discomfort of not immediately knowing what to do.
If someone cannot or will not do that, there is no workaround for it.
And the really frustrating part is that when you ask young people themselves what is affecting them, what is shaping their behavior, what is making learning feel harder, the answer that keeps coming up again and again is “social media.”
Not even in a reflective or abstract way. In a very immediate, blunt way. It is just part of their environment, part of their attention, part of how they interact with everything, including learning spaces.
So at a certain point I am left with a very simple conclusion, even if people do not like hearing it.
We either have to do something serious about how social media is shaping attention, learning, and willingness to engage, or we are going to keep running into situations where entire pipelines of training and apprenticeship become harder and harder to sustain.
And if the answer is not banning access outright, then it at least has to involve meaningful guardrails. Because right now what we are seeing is not just “kids being kids” or “new generations being different.” It is a structural change in how people approach effort, failure, and learning itself, and it is already affecting real-world skill development in ways that are very very hard to ignore if you actually exist offline in an education or related field/situation and aren't just on tumblr bitching about shit you literally aren't affected by because you don't have to train human beings around it.
titsay
vaporwave
jbbartram-illu
andulkaphoto
