There is one generation that has been consistently defined by its obsessions: avocado toast, memes, Harry Potter … and self-care. They are often perceived as entitled snowflakes, but millennials might be the generation of emotional intelligence.
Hard work is picking lettuce 8 hours a day in 90 degree heat. Hard work is being a single mother or father who has to work two minimum wage jobs back to back with nary a recuperative break all day. Hard work is heaving dirt and rock on a construction site. Or working with industrial equipment that could crush you if you make the wrong move.
Racism pervades our country. Students who have roiled college campuses from coast to coast have that exactly right. But we’re never going to make the progress that we need to if they hurl the word “racist” as reflexively and indiscriminately as some of them do, in a frenzy of righteousness aimed at gagging speakers and strangling debate.
The problem is this: Facebook has become a feedback loop which can and does, despite its best intentions, become a vicious spiral. At Facebook’s scale, behavioral targeting doesn’t just reflect our behavior, it actually influences it. Over time, a service which was supposed to connect humanity is actually partitioning us into fractal disconnected bubbles.
