Generation Power

I do understand why we tend to identify with our generation due to commonality but I don't understand the rationale for that commonality when we also embrace ideas like diversity and inclusion. We embrace ideas like diversity and inclusion because we love our identification.

If we were naturally diverse, we would be naturally inclusive. We are not. I understand the need to be adaptive, to be open minded, to think for ourselves and in thinking for ourselves learn from that thinking. That is why I am interested in the idea of Generation Power.

Generation Power is not the generations who have power, because each generation tries to take its own power and unfortunately older generation groupings like Boomers have used the instruments of political power to give themselves a disproportional advantage.

What I call Generation Power is the INDIVIDUAL. The reason we look down upon the word Individual is when we are cultivated in the perspective of the group. We have always been about the group, across centuries we find our tribe and pay its tribal consequence.

Covid does not kill the group it kills individuals and while it is a small percentage of individuals, scaled across a population size of billions, the numbers extrapolate to a horrible death count. This is not the worst pandemic that hit the world, just the first on Social Media.

I am not a fan of classifying ourselves as our particular generation for the simple reason that I don't identify with the marketing classification subscribed to me, that is not of my choosing. That is why I identify with Generation Power because it is holistic in its meaning.

We started with the boomers and then had Gen X (which were originally called baby-busters) and then the Millennials and Gen this and Gen Z and now the Covid Generation.

We need a classification system like the Dewey Decimal System because that is how we find a book in the library, so classifying a generation for means of drilling down on a data set sounds reasonable to me, but what does not is turning this into a fricking identity label.

If we can name the enemy we can target our resentment, so the FT article about "Generation Covid is Losing Out" is more fascinating to me in how it shows us "resentment". There is nothing new about groups identifying with their groups and making an enemy of another.

Tribal conflicts and wars are not created because an individual in a bedroom is taking depression medication, it is a small group of influencers convincing "their" group to protect that groups interest. It is a mental virus that kills more than most biological ones can.

We should pay attention to the idea of the "Lost Generation" because we have been trying to apply this view to multiple generations and it continues to carry currency because there is speckles of reality sprinkled into the notion, but we have not lost a generation yet.

If I begin to focus on being the "lost generation" and I am losing, that is not going to help my own generation power. I know what labels due to society because history is full of these divisions. It is not full of multiplications other than a focus on spreading bad news.

Before the Boomers, because we did not have a marketing classification for them, we called them the "Greatest Generation". Hands down there is no comparison between the "Greatest Generation" and any of our generations, but we hardly identify with the this War nightmare.

That "Greatest Generation" must have had their "Generation Power" because they survived a global catastrophe. If we don't call an estimated 56 million dead a global catastrophe, then we have lost sight of the comparative magnitude with the nature of pandemic as it is today.

If we are not bound by our classification and not blindsided by a chronological bias, we can ask ourselves how humans placed in a hell hole of life managed to get themselves out of that hell-hole and keep humanity going, even though the worst climate disaster 12,000 years ago.

For me to have Generation Power I know I need to turn off corporate media like CNN, Fox, MSNBC etc etc and turn on the media of my own mind. The first thing to end is the rating battle happening in my own mind without concerning the rating opportunity of big media.

One of those battles is the fear of death and our need to medicate ourselves against our own self-inflicted attention habits. Just because someone wants our attention does not mean we need to be lemmings and jump off their media cliff into our own form of mental illness.

If corporate news does not cripple our own nervous system, the only people who know if it can is us. We can't blame people for creating news that sells. We don't need to blame ourselves either for enabling the profit motive for news. We just need to know our power.

Once we know how to pull ourselves out individually out of the news cycle, we can learn to pull ourselves in, so in the case of coronavirus death rates - we are teaching ourselves the POWER OF PROPORTIONALITY. This means keeping news proportional to actual fact.

Fake news is for suckers and if our media habits are not creating that fake news, then keep up the good habits and continue focusing on our Generation Power. The more we cultivate great habits, the more of us create a demand for a news type that sells those ratings.

The battle for our mind now is mostly about the "Vaccine". We do not trust our institutions not because they are institutions but because they are groups. More importantly we do not trust our selves because our need is to disprove the other and yet still trust our own group !

The thing I don't understand is how we can distrust one group but choose to trust our own group. I can't think of a worse misinformation system than sharing information that we ourselves have not read, and more importantly is how we need to consume for ourselves.

When I found the The Conversation Article about vaccines, that serves an individual purpose, to fulfill my curiousity, but we have created a group share culture where we cannot get off our addiction to a master and servant relationships. We still foster a need for Kings.

Even when I found this particular piece, what I focused on was those take away points that resonated with me. Just because this point resonated with me, does not mean that someone should anoint me as a King and go crowning another "Influencer" - that is a stupid mindset.

"The idea that we're going to have a vaccine in 2-3 months, and then all of a sudden this virus is going to go away -- I would love to be here saying that to you, but that's just not realistic," Ryan said.

We may need others to help us to figure this stuff out if all we ever have done is rely on other people to do our thinking for us. That is NOT Generation Power - that is exactly why we find solace in identifying ourselves with OUR generational classification.

If I am learning something from the small sample size of possible media, it is me learning about my own selection choices and not me promoting myself as some thing to follow and have other people contaminate themselves with this kind of horrible idea virus.

One of the jumping off points in my exploration here was Body Mass Index. The reasoning is very simple, if I believe in probability, then to reduce probability I naturally need to look at things that improve my health. If I improve my health I reduce probability of my death.

When I checked my BMI (Body Mass Index) it is currently at a whopping 31.6, which only tells me what I can see physically, that I am obese. The key thing about a metric is that it sharpens the mind, but if a virus targets to kill the unhealthy, I am doing myself no favours.

Do I then need to go out into the media and proselytize healthier habits. Only if I am operating from a group mindset and we don't necessarily need to suffer from group think in order to have a group mindset. Our education system is not invested in us as Individuals.

Yes I am a chameleon and I am a shape shifter, but it is not for edification of the group but directly for the promulgation of my own wisdom. If I choose to accept a fact that is not true then I am my own dumb-shit. I don't need to call other people sheep when I'm the BAAAA.

Take this final artifact, a piece from The Atlantic. I am not reading it to find out why we lack empathy for elder people and as a society are not as reactive when 80 year olds snuff it in large numbers rather than when people in our own generation snuff it in large numbers.

I read it because it empowers my mind. It might even trigger my empathy but that was not the intent in reading this. It is the sum total of this reading or watching phase which is interesting to me, because it yields thoughts in me that would not have yielded otherwise.

It is not important that I put my own take on such articles, it is what I take away, and what that take away does over time. Maybe the greatest change point is two years down the road, when I reference this thought piece. My future can make more sense out of my present me.

My general takeaway across the board today is that this virus we are so obsessed with from a media point of view, rather than from a learning point of view, is that it has done more for our society than Corporate HR has managed to and will manage to do in a 1000 years.

If Covid has brought young people "back home", then our first thought maybe that they endangering their parents. A more holistic thought is that they will care more about keeping their parents alive and that is not bringing in the subject of psychopathic people as a lens.

We might be drawing closer and more tight knit as a family of individuals rather than individuals defined by group memes and behaviours. For sure divorce is up but that is a group mindset about living alone. As individuals young people know what survival is.

It is the group that isolates us, it is the true individual that brings us together and in a more natural way, which may lead to the revival of villages and real world communities. Maybe there is physical distancing but that distancing brings us closer to our being as an individual.

We cannot distance our life from ourselves but incredibly we are. When there is psychic imbalance within us, it is between our sense of the group and knowing who we are. I don't need to hark to Socrates maxim "Know Thyself" only Covid's maxim "Know Thy Virus".