"Relating to young people is no different than it was fifty years ago.
Instead of pretending to understand, or appreciate their style of music and entertainment, I ask open ended questions and see what comes next. Some young people are quite erudite and intelligent and some are airheads, which tracks with people of my generation.
The difference comes when smoke and vapor issues come up like 'social justice' and personal responsibility. Most young people have been indoctrinated into code words and trigger phrases that they cant define, nor apply with anything more than generalizations and flat out wrong retorts.
I think this is part of being a young adult. You come into awareness of broad social issues, and you take on the surface opinions floating around out there. There is a transition from just accepting what your parents taught you to what you imagine by comparison is "thinking for yourself" as an adult. Unfortunately today the predominant opinions available are these code words and trigger phrases being trotted out by a media with a very biased agenda. So these young people are NOT actually thinking for themselves; they're taking on the culture around them with no more depth than when they simply accepted what their parents told them as a child.
The next step in maturity is to dig deeper. Rather than believe for example that women are being unfairly compensated for work because of sexism just because you keep hearing this in the media and all your friends believe it, you question whether this is in fact true, and you work at gaining a more comprehensive understanding of the issue. This requires applying critical thinking, objectivity, willingness to accept new information, and so on. To fully appreciate the women's compensation issue, you even need to have a working knowledge of basic economics; supply and demand and so forth. Over time you learn that issues aren't so simple, but there are layers of facts to be considered, that you simply aren't aware of when you first consider the idea.
For example when I was 14 the Vietnam War was in full force. Because I never fit in with the popular kids at school, my friends were the nerds and rejects, and several of them were taking on the hippie culture. For my part, I saw on TV every day reports of Americans killed. Without much depth of thought or understanding, I took on the opinion the war was "bad" and we should get out of it, simply because my friends thought that and I had no more information than Americans were being killed and some of them were going to be my friends. Indeed a common topic of conversation with my male peers was the draft lottery.
Fortunately at age 14 I had not yet started writing letters to the editor or participating in any demonstrations so my opinion had no effect on society. By the time I started doing those things I had matured and come to a deeper understanding of the whole thing. I came to understand how we become involved, WHY we were involved, and furthermore, the mistakes we made and the reasons we failed, and the reasons the anti-war activists were in fact wrong and caused much more needless damage, probably even causing us to lose the war. That's the difference between an immature opinion and a fully informed mature opinion.
Such nuanced concepts such as this: No matter whether it is right or wrong to have entered a war, once entered, you must fully support it to win as fast and as decisively as possible or you'll cause massively increased human suffering. I didn't get that at age 14. I do now.
I'm not saying my fully formed opinion is the correct one; someone else might have a different opinion but also based on a lot of critical thinking to support it. There are so many different ways to study a thing we don't all come to identical conclusions. I'm saying that young people go through a process of maturity that involves increasingly complex steps of thought in forming their views. IN GENERAL the younger they are, the more shallow their opinion. They may FEEL deeply about it, but that's not the same as having performed deep objective examination.
Rather than talk to a blank wall, its best to simply point out the facts and offer actual examples of things that accomplish something instead of sounding nice and PC.
Yes and you are helping them start the process of critical examination of all the facts. First they need to be made aware that there
are facts outside their limited viewpoint. Hopefully that should be all that's needed to get them to explore the matter more deeply. To recognize propaganda is one of the first things they must learn.
I too plant and care for flower beds, feed squirrels and birds, pet the neighbors dogs and engage their kids in discussions about the latest superhero, or really cool video game. When they grow up I try to engage them in substantive discussions about their future and their civic responsibility, which has become so old fashion that its about to become popular again.
Sounds like you're pretty cool. One of the things wrong with our educational system and our lifestyles in general is that we segregate the generations. Kids are put into classes with all the same age rather than benefiting from older ones and helping younger ones. Grandparents live in retirement farms now rather than staying in the home with the family. We've lost some of the benefits of young people being exposed to older people's ideas, and old people enjoying being around the optimistic energy of the young.