By Howard Tullman

24-Aug-24 – The summer’s almost over and we’re about to ship another generation of kids off to colleges across the country, accompanied by the typical quotient of parental instructions, cautions, and pithy life lessons drawn from our own experiences. Sadly, these traditional cautions and sage constructs have increasingly less value and application in a world of constant and radical change that they’re about to enter. Not that we ever exactly listened to what our parents had to say on these subjects, but these days so many parents seem to have no real idea of what to say in the first place.

Interestingly enough, professional college counselors will tell you that the biggest part of their job is often to serve as a neutral intermediary and communicator between their client kids and the paying parents, since the kids don’t talk to them.

This isn’t all that much different than the dilemma that so many employers are facing in terms of what they need to be sharing with their newest employees. The old guidelines, goalposts, aspirations, and even career objectives have changed to such an extent that it’s hard to imagine what useful guidance anyone should offer. Everyone also seems to be wary of saying something politically incorrect or offending the snowflakes. Employers are walking on eggshells.

That’s not the case for omniscient college professors, who in their moral certitude feel free to lecture their captive audiences on all matters large and small. Inevitably, owners and managers in the real world will then have to deal with a wave of incoming newbies whose world views and expectations may often be uninformed, misdirected, or simply wrong – but rarely in doubt.

While there’s plenty of shared blame and many explanations for how rapidly things have changed, the critical chronological starting point is simple. The cohort about to enter college was largely born in 2006. The iPhone was introduced in January 2007.

They will be the first group of kids raised entirely in a world of global cellular connectivity, on-demand and effortless access to “answers” for any inquiry, and a non-stop, interruptive, manipulative, and dopamine-driven flow of algorithmic, exploitative garbage regarding every topic, concern, and conflict in their lives.

No wonder that they’ve come to believe that they already know it all because it’s all right there in living color, 24/7, in the palm of their hands.

Nature abhors a vacuum and when parents and leaders don’t know what to say or how to say it, the phone’s right there with a simple skewed and stilted response.

One of the most frightening recent developments is the acknowledgement that the outputs of nearly all the new chatbots are optimized, not for truth or accuracy, but for believability and faux authenticity. Selling the story – creating the comforting reply – is more critical than the credibility of the underlying substance. Just like sincerity, once you can fake it, you’ve got it made.

The dream of enhanced transparency, expanded and extended enlightenment, and especially peer-to-peer education has collapsed and been corrupted into a social media sewer – a little of everything and a lot of nothing that prizes engagement and enragement, speed and superficiality, and form over substance. Nothing matters for more than a moment. Lady Gaga called social media “the toilet of the internet“ and never looked back.

What’s abundantly clear is that technology and the web aren’t going to help the next generation learn anything about managing the substantial and perilous transition they’re facing. Even worse, all the tech-saturated conversations of the last decade or two have reinforced a single, overwhelming message. Which is that they should forget the lessons and the ways that things have always been done in the past – often for good and sufficient reasons – and press ever forward.

No one becomes a raging success in the past. It’s not really nasty nihilism as much as negligent indifference and the continued reinforcement of the belief that there’s nothing new to be learned by looking backwards. Gorodenkoff Productions OU

So, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to figure out what suggestions that anyone with even the best of intentions can offer. I’ve noted that many of us may have been focusing on the wrong things when we’ve offered advice to our kids. The most basic and important ideas that will withstand the test of time are those that relate to building our kids’ ability to bounce back, to learn to preserve their options, and roll with the punches – and to not be embarrassed or afraid to ask for help. All the rest is “Rah! Rah!” and rarely suited to offer much real help.

One thing for sure is that parents today don’t do their kids any favors by suggesting they follow in their own career footsteps. The worst thing you can wish for your offspring is that they plan to spend their working lives doing one thing and only that for decades. We all thought that the long-understood vision of stability, security, and longevity was something that everyone should aspire to, but that’s not what the future holds for our kids. The good news for them is that it’s never going to happen anyway.

It’s not even clear that – at any moment in time – any of them will simply hold a single job. The gig economy, side hustles, fractionalized employees, and shared positions are all becoming more common as employers try to adapt to the post-pandemic normal, a world of remote workers, and the need to make their personnel costs as flexible and variable as possible. What the working world will look like four years from now is anyone’s guess.

The only thing that seems certain is that the answers aren’t going to be generated by a magical chatbot because it’s absolutely known that you can’t Google the future.