best and worst

They are not as bad as we think and we were worse than we say

2 abril, 2014

Over the past few years, I have been hearing a frequently repeated idea which nowadays makes no sense to me.
It’s a common thought among people in their thirties. “Young people have no respect for adults” And also ideas like this one: “They are worse than we were, with a low academic level and less ability to learn and work by themselves”.
It’s an apocaliptic view of our teenagers which is often said by people who have forgotten how they were a few years ago. When people are getting older they tend to think that everything is changing at the same speed they change. However we are not aware of how fast we change our point of view, our feelings, our opinions and our preferences. Therefore we are not aware of how all these changes interfere in our memory. I recently saw a talk in www.ted.com which talked about our memory and why it’s so unreliable. It talked about a number of witnesses who said in a court something absolutely false but which they were absolutely sure about.
Our memory is a changeable and unreliable thing and especially when we talk about the memory that we construct with the perception of a teenager.